r 


RECENT  HISTORY 
OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 


BY 
FREDERIC  L.  PAXSON 

Professor  of  History  in  the  University  of  Wisconsin 

Sometime  Major,  U.S.A.  Historical  Branch,  General  Staff 

Author,  The  New  Nation 


HOUGHTON  MIFFLIN  COMPANY 

BOSTON  •  NEW  YORK  •  CHICAGO  •  SAN  FRANCISCO 

Cambrit>0e 


P3s 


COPYRIGHT,    1921,   BY   FREDERIC    L.   PAXSON 
ALL    RIGHTS    RESERVED 


CAMBRIDGB  •    MASSACHUSETTS 
U    -    S    •    A 


PREFACE 

THE  period  covered  in  this  narrative  falls  between  two 
eras.  It  is  preceded  by  the  age  of  national  growth  across 
the  continent,  in  which  one  frontier  after  another  was  ab 
sorbed  by  society.  It  seems  likely  to  be  followed  by  an 
era  of  American  permeation  of  the  world.  The  Civil  War 
and  Reconstruction  furnished  much  of  its  spiritual  back 
ground,  but  belonged  to  the  period  that  was  gone.  The 
World  War  was  the  natural  outgrowth  of  the  rivalries  of 
the  age  itself.  Separated  from  the  past  by  one  period  of 
reconstruction,  and  from  the  future  by  another,  the  years 
1877  to  1921  have  a  distinct  unity  as  the  period  in  which  the 
new  nation  of  the  Western  Hemisphere  found  itself  and 
realized  its  powers.  The  years  are  substantially  the  age 
of  Roosevelt,  although  they  overlap  a  little  at  either  end 
of  the  public  life  of  that  statesman.  More  than  any  other 
American,  he  seems  to  have  personified  his  generation,  and 
although  others  may  have  thought  more  deeply,  or  con 
tributed  more  permanently  to  the  advancement  of  Ameri 
can  ideals,  his  virtues  and  defects  are  those  that  illustrate 
best  the  American  character  at  the  meeting  of  the  cen 
turies. 

I  owe  much  of  what  is  good  in  this  book  to  the  careful 
criticism  of  my  wife,  and  the  patient  forbearance  of  my 
secretary,  Miss  Caroline  W.  Munro.  To  the  generosity  of 
my  commanding  officer  in  the  World  War,  Colonel  Charles 
W.  Weeks,  G.S.,  I  owe  my  opportunity  to  see  in  action  much 
of  the  vast  machine  with  which  the  United  States  realized 
its  determination  to  maintain  its  ideal  of  democracy. 

FREDERIC  L.  PAXSON 

Madison,  Wisconsin 

4G0578 


CONTENTS 

CHAPTER  I.  THE  BASIS  OF  PEACE  i 

Inauguration  of  Hayes  —  Cabinet  and  Congress  —  Home  rule  in 
the  South  -£-  Educational  renascence  —  Land-grant  colleges  —  Reli 
gious  colleges  —  Women's  education  —  Education  of  negroes  —  Pro 
fessional  education  —  Johns  Hopkins  University  —  Bibliographical 
note. 

CHAPTER  II.  CIVIL  AND  BORDER  STRIFE  14 

Deadlock  over  army  bills  —  Canadian  annexation  —  Mexican  Revolu 
tion  of  1876  —  Indian  wars,  1876-77  —  Social  unrest  —  National 
Labor  Union  —  The  "Molly  Maguires"  —  Railroad  strikes  of  1877 
—  Socialism  —  Bibliographical  note. 

CHAPTER  III.  POST-BELLUM  IDEALS    X  26 

Literary  periodicals  —  Whittier  dinner  —  Mark  Twain  —  The  new 
writers  —  Transition  in  literature  —  "Ethiopiomania" —  Dialect  lit 
erature  —  Provincialism  —  Historical  writing  —  Bibliographical  note. 

CHAPTER  IV.  SPECIE  PAYMENTS,  1879  35 

Silver  and  greenbacks  —  Decline  in  silver  —  Mining  booms  and  free 
silver  —  Bland-Allison  Act,  1878  —  Resumption  Act  —  Greenback 
Party  —  Election  frauds  —  Resumption  —  Bibliographical  note. 

CHAPTER  V.  THE  COLLAPSE  OF  THE  STALWARTS,  1880  x  46 

Republican  factions  --  Office-holders  in  politics  --  Arthur  and 
Cornell  —  Return  of  Grant  —  Nominations  of  1880  —  Election  of 
Garfield  —  Patronage  and  the  Senate  —  Murder  of  Garfield  —  Ches 
ter  A.  Arthur  —  Bibliographical  note. 

CHAPTER  VI.  THE  NATIONAL  TRANSPORTATION  PLANT  56 

Era  of  prosperity  —  Disappearance  of  frontier  —  Land  grants  to 
railroads  —  The  Northern  Pacific  Railway  —  Standard  time  —  Star- 
route  frauds  --  The  Hubbell  letter  —  Acquittal  of  Dorsey  and 
Brady  —  Bibliographical  note. 

CHAPTER  VII.  BUSINESS  AND  SOCIETY  66 

Kerosene  —  The  telegraph  —  The  telephone  —  The  typewriter  — 
Incandescent  lights  —  Industrial  reorganization  —  Development  of 
the  South  —  Money  kings  —  Popular  recreation  —  Bibliographical 
note. 

CHAPTER  VIII.  REFORM  76 

Congressional  elections,  1882  —  Tariff  revision  —  National  prosperity 
in  the  eighties  —  Tariff  Commission,  1882  —  Tariff  of  1883  —  Ar 
thur's  Administration  —  Civil  service  reform  —  Bibliographical 
note. 


vi  CONTENTS 

CHAPTER  IX.  THE  MUGWUMP  CAMPAIGN,  1884  86 

Tariff  and  politics  —  Benjamin  F.  Butler  —  James  G.  Blaine  —  The 
Irish  vote  —  The  "Mulligan  letters"  —  Mugwumps  —  Republican 
Convention  —  Grover  Cleveland  —  The  canvass  of  1884  —  Biblio 
graphical  note. 

CHAPTER  X.  THE  NATIONAL  ESTATE  96 

Cleveland's  Cabinet  —  Civil  War  pensions  —  Public  land  frauds  — 
Railroad  land  grants  —  Panic  of  1884  —  Cheap  silver  money  — 
Death  of  Grant  —  Bibliographical  note. 

CHAPTER  XL  THE  CLOSED  FRONTIER  106 

The  cattle  kings  —  American  food  supply  —  The  long  drive  —  Chi 
cago  stockyards  —  Cattle  ranches  —  End  of  the  long  drive  —  Inter 
state  commerce  —  The  Granger  movement  —  Department  of  Agri 
culture  —  Bibliographical  note. 

CHAPTER  XII.  WILD  WEST  AND  SPORT  116 

Frontier  spirit  —  "  Buffalo  Bill "  —  "Greatest  Show  on  Earth  "  —  Rise 
of  sport  —  Yachting  —  Walking  —  Boxing  —  Baseball  —  Amateur 
sports  —  Bibliographical  note. 

CHAPTER  XIII.  LABOR  IDEALS  126 

Labor  movement  —  Wages  and  prices  —  Bureau  of  Labor  —  An 
archy  and  socialism  —  Henry  George  and  labor  parties  —  South 
western  strikes  —  Potter,  Bellamy,  and  Ford  —  City-life  problems 
—  Social  workers  —  Bibliographical  note. 

CHAPTER  XIV.  THE  ELECTION  OF  1888  135 

Tariff  issue  —  Party  conventions  —  Benjamin  Harrison  —  Canvass 
of  1888  —  Secret  ballot  —  Bibliographical  note. 

CHAPTER  XV.  PROTECTION  145 

Harrison's  Cabinet  —  Organization  of  Fifty-First  Congress  —  The 
McKinley  tariff  —  Sherman  Silver  Purchase  Act  —  Anti-monopoly 
movement  —  Sherman  Anti-Trust  Law  —  Bibliographical  note. 

CHAPTER  XVI.  THE  FAR  WEST  IN  POLITICS  155 

Admission  of  the  omnibus  States  —  Division  of  Dakota  —  Indian 
Territory  —  Opening  of  Oklahoma  —  Utah  —  Woman  suffrage  — 
Bibliographical  note. 

CHAPTER  XVII.  POPULISM  165 

Agricultural  over-production  —  Farmers'  Alliances  —  Drought  — 
The  Free-silver  movement  —  Southern  Alliances  —  The  Populist 
Party  —  Bibliographical  note. 

CHAPTER  XVIII.  THE  REELECTION  OF  CLEVELAND,  1892  174 

The  Pop"li«t  plntform  — The  Harrison  Administration — The  Re 
publican  Convention  —  Death  of  Blaine  —  Renomination  of  Cleve 
land  —  The  Canvass  of  1882  —  Cleveland's  second  Cabinet  —  Bib 
liographical  note. 


CONTENTS  vii 

CHAPTER  XIX.  THE  PANIC  OF  1893  184 

State  of  the  Treasury,  1893  —  Causes  of  the  panic  of  1893  —  Panic 
and  depression  —  Repeal  of  the  Sherman  Silver  Purchase  Act  — 
Bibliographical  note. 

CHAPTER  XX.  INDUSTRIAL  UNREST  194 

Free  silver  and  class  interests  —  World's  Columbian  Exposition  — 
The  age  of  steel  —  The  Homestead  strike  —  The  Pullman  strike 

—  Government  by  injunction  —  The  militia  and  regular  army  — 
Bibliographical  note. 

CHAPTER  XXI.  THE  DEMOCRATIC  SCHISM  204 

Democratic  campaign  pledges  —  Effect  of  the  repeal  of  the  Sherman 
Act  —  Successes  of  the  Populists  —  The  state  of  the  Treasury  —  The 
Wilson  tariff  of  1894  —  The  elections  of  1894  —  The  Venezuela  dis 
pute  —  The  new  American  navy  —  Bibliographical  note. 

CHAPTER  XXII.  THE  FIRST  MCKINLEY  CAMPAIGN,  1896  214 

Protection  and  the  gold  standard  —  McKinley  and  protection  — 
Hanna  and  the  Ohio  statesmen  —  McKinley  and  Hobart  —  Coinage 
planks  in  party  platforms  —  William  J.  Bryan  —  Populism  —  The 
gold  Democrats  —  Election  of  McKinley  —  Bibliographical  note. 

CHAPTER  XXIII.  THE  "G.O.P."  224 

Property  and  politics  —  Prosperity  and  rising  prices  —  McKinley's 
Cabinet  —  The  Dingley  tariff  —  Republican  counter-reformation  — 
The  "interests"  in  politics  —  Direct  primaries  —  Submergence  of 
reform  —  Bibliographical  note. 

CHAPTER  XXIV.  THE  WAR  WITH  SPAIN  233 

Cuban  pacification  —  Insurrection  of  1895  —  Spain  and  the  insur 
rection  —  Woodford  and  Weyler  —  Destruction  of  the  Maine  — 
Naval  mobilization  —  The  Spanish  War  —  Dewey  at  Manila  —  Bib 
liographical  note. 

CHAPTER  XXV.  THE  INVASION  OF  CUBA  242 

The  Philippines  and  Hawaii  —  Army  legislation  —  Sampson  and  the 
Atlantic  fleet  —  Patrol  of  Cuban  coasts  —  Blockade  of  Santiago  — 
Army  and  navy  cooperation  —  Battle  of  Las  Guasimas  —  Biblio 
graphical  note. 

CHAPTER  XXVI.  SANTIAGO  AND  THE  PEACE  252 

Advance  on  Santiago  —  Battle  of  San  Juan  —  Naval  battle  —  Health 
of  the  army  —  Armistice  —  Peace  Commission  —  Problem  of  the 
Philippines  —  Congressional  election  of  1898  —  Ratification  of  the 
treaty  —  Bibliographical  note. 

CHAPTER  XXVII.  THE  CAMPAIGN  OF  1900  264 _ 

McKinley  and  Republican  Party  —  Business  in  politics  —  Gold  stand 
ard  legislation  —  Revival  of  prosperity  —  The  new  trusts — Decline 
of  Populism  —  Renomination  of  Bryan  —  McKinley  and  Roosevelt 

—  Public  opinion  and  the  issues — Assassination  of  McKinley  —  Bib 
liographical  note. 


viii  CONTENTS 

CHAPTER  XXVIII.  THEODORE  ROOSEVELT  274 

Youth  of  Roosevelt  —  Early  political  career  —  Other  activities  — 
Two  political  eras  —  The  office  of  President  —  The  National  Com 
mittee  —  Hanna  and  Roosevelt  —  Booker  T.  Washington  —  Labor 
problems  —  Bibliographical  note. 

CHAPTER  XXIX.  WORLD  POLICY  283 

Hay  and  Root  —  The  "open-door"  policy  —  Panama  Canal  problems 
—  Venezuela  intervention  —  Government  of  Porto  Rico  —  Cuban 
independence  —  The  Philippines  —  Reorganization  of  War  Depart 
ment  —  Military  education  —  General  Staff  —  Bibliographical  note. 

-  CHAPTER  XXX.  BUSINESS  IN  POLITICS  293 

Railroad  reorganization  —  The  Harriman  system  —  The  Southern 
Pacific  merger  —  Integration  of  the  steel  industry  —  The  Sherman 
Anti-Trust  Act  —  The  Northern  Securities  Company  —  Northern 
Securities  prosecution  —  Anti-trust  laws,  1903  —  Bibliographical 
note. 

CHAPTER  XXXI.  THE  ROOSEVELT  CAMPAIGN  302 

Cuban  reciprocity  —  Anthracite  coal  strike,  1902  —  Congressional 
election  of  1902  —  The  "  Iowa  "  idea  and  the  tariff  —  Joseph  G.  Can 
non,  Speaker  —  Hanna  and  the  conservatives  /f1  The  Republicans 
nominate  Roosevelt,  1904 — Alton  B.  Parker,  the  Democratic  nomi 
nee,  1904  —  Campaign  funds  —  Bibliographical  note. 

CHAPTER  XXXII.  MUCKRAKING  AND  THE  NEW  STANDARDS  312 

Public  opinion  and  business  —  New  types  of  journalism  —  The  ten- 
cent  magazines  —  Ida  M.  Tarbell  —  Literature  of  exposure  —  Liter 
ary  and  dramatic  standards  —  Vaudeville  and  movies  —  Music  and 
opera  —  Religious  and  social  spirit  —  The  Carnegie  benevolences  — 
The  Rockefeller  Foundation  —  Educational  trend  —  Specialists  in 
government  —  Federal  civil  service  —  Bibliographical  note. 

CHAPTER  XXXIII.  THE  EXTENSION  OF  GOVERNMENT  CONTROL      325 
Immigration  problems  —  Northern  Securities  Case  —  Economics  of 
the  trust  problem  —  The  Ananias  Club — The  Hepburn  Railroad 
Law  —  Abolition  of    free  passes  —  Food   control,    1906  —  Admis 
sion  of  Oklahoma  —  Bibliographical  note. 

CHAPTER  XXXIV.  NATIONAL  RESOURCES  334 

Period  of  prosperity  —  Panic  of  1907  —  Disappearance  of  American 
frontier  —  Land  losses  and  conservation  —  Irrigation  —  Control  of 
water  powers  —  Inland  navigation,  the  Mississippi  —  Forest  re 
serves  —  Conservation  conference,  1908  —  Bureau  of  Mines  —  Super 
vision  of  business  —  Bibliographical  note. 

CHAPTER  XXXV.  WORLD  POWER  343 

American  battle  fleet,  1907-09  —  War  Department  changes  —  Taft 
and  the  colonies  —  Russo-Japanese  W7ar  —  Algeciras  Conference  — 
Second  Hague  Conference  —  The  Declaration  of  London,  1909  — 
The  Panama  Revolution  —  Canal  construction  —  Bibliographical 
note. 


CONTENTS  ix 

CHAPTER  XXXVI.  WILLIAM  HOWARD  TAFT  354 

Political  manners,  1900-09  —  Republican  leaders  —  Hughes,  Taft, 
and  Root  —  Taft  and  Sherman  —  Death  of  Cleveland  —  Bryan  and 
Kern — Third  parties — Labor  and  politics  —  Election  of  Taft  —  Bib 
liographical  note. 

CHAPTER  XXXVII.  THE  PARTY  PLEDGE  364 

Departure  of  Roosevelt  -  -  Tariff  revision  -  -  The  Payne-Aldrich 
tariff,  1909  —  Income  Tax  Amendment  —  Rise  of  insurgents  —  The 
Ballinger  controversy  —  The  West  and  conservation  —  Bibliograph 
ical  note. 

CHAPTER  XXXVIII.  INSURGENCY  373 

I  nsurgent  revolt — Attack  on  Cannon  —  Program  of  reforms  —  Change 
in  House  rules  —  Administrative  progress  of  Taft  —  Admission  of 
Arizona  and  New  Mexico — Alaska  Territory — Railroad  Act  of  1910 

—  Return  of  Roosevelt  —  "New  Nationalism"     -  Bibliographical 
note. 

CHAPTER  XXXIX.  THE  PROGRAM  OF  PEACE  383 

Goethals  and  the  Panama  Canal  —  Latin-American  neighbors  — 
Canadian  fisheries  dispute  —  James  Bryce  and  British  arbitration  — 
Carnegie  and  the  Palace  of  Peace  —  Taft  and  the  reorganized  Su 
preme  Court  —  Champ  Clark  and  the  Democratic  program  —  Cana 
dian  reciprocity  —  Hudson-Fulton  celebration  —  Mechanical  and 
scientific  progress  —  Bibliographical  note. 

CHAPTER  XL.  THE  CAMPAIGN  OF  1912  393 

The  National  Progressive  Republican  League  —  Taft  and  party  split 

—  La  Follette  and  the  nomination  —  Roosevelt  again  —  Fight  for 
convention  delegates  —  The  National  Committee  and  contests  — 
Taft  and  Sherman  —  The  Democratic  Convention  —  Woodrow  Wil 
son  —  The  Progressive  Party  and  Roosevelt  —  Democratic  victory 

—  Bibliographical  note. 

CHAPTER  XLI.  WOODROW  WILSON  403 

A  minority  President  —  Wilson's  Cabinet  — Tariff  revision  —  Presi 
dential  leadership  —  Underwood-Simmons  Act,  1913  —  Monetary 
investigations  —  Federal  Reserve  Act  —  Bibliographical  note. 

CHAPTER  XLII.  FEDERAL  CONTROL  413 

Anti-trust  policies  —  Finance  and  trusts  —  Federal  Trade  Commis 
sion  —  Department  of  Labor  —  Children's  Bureau  —  Workmen's 
Compensation  —  Educational  grants  —  Seamen's  Act  —  Critical 
journalism  --  Philippine  Government  —  Attack  on  Bryan  and 
Daniels  —  Bibliographical  note. 

CHAPTER  XLIII.  WATCHFUL  WAITING  423 

Bryan  in  State  Department  —  Mexican  Revolution  —  The  Huerta 
Administration  —  The  Mobile  Doctrine  —  Canal  treaty  with  Colom 
bia —  Mexican  intervention — Diplomatic  isolation  of  United  States 
—  Repeal  of  Panama  Canal  tolls  exemption  —  Central  American  rela 
tions  —  Opening  of  Panama  and  Kiel  Canals  —  Bibliographical  note. 


CONTENTS 

CHAPTER  XLIV.  NEUTRALITY  AND  PREPAREDNESS  433 

The  World  War  —  American  neutrality  —  Friendly  services  —  Cen 
sorship  and  propaganda  —  Pro- Allies  opinion  —  War  revenue  legisla 
tion  —  Democratic  successes,  1914  —  American  grievances  —  The 
submarine  —  Submarine  warfare  —  " Strict^ accountability "  -The 
Lusitania  —  The  Preparedness  movement  —  Bibliographical  note. 

CHAPTER  XLV.  THE  ELECTION  OF  1916  445 

Pacifist  movements  —  League  to  Enforce  Peace  —  Munitions  em 
bargoes  —  German  secret  intrigue  —  Sussex  ultimatum  and  pledge  — 
National  Defense  Act,  1916  —  Naval  program  —  Council  of  National 
Defense  —  Roosevelt  and  Progressives  —  Nomination  of  Hughes 
by  the  Republicans  —  Hyphenated  Americans  —  Wilson  and  Adam- 
son  Bill  —  Reelection  of  WTilson  —  Bibliographical  note. 

..CHAPTER  XLVI.  LABOR  456 

S        Wages  and  cost  of  living — The  Adamson  Law  —  Gompers  and  the 
jC^          American  Federation  of  Labor  —  Socialist  Party  —  Syndicalism  and 
/  \  sabotage  —  State  constabularies — Industrial  Workers  of  the  World  — 

The  McNamara  and  TVIooney  cases  —  Americanization  —  Woman 
Suffrage  —  Non-Partisan  League  —  Bibliographical  note. 

CHAPTER  XLVII.  THE  WAR  OF  1917  467 

Status  of  the  war  —  German  peace  overtures,  1916  —  American 
peace  terms  inquiry  —  Unrestricted  submarine  warfare  —  Breach 
with  Germany  —  Anti-war  agitation  —  Armed  merchant  ships  — 
Senate  filibuster — Closure  rule  in  Senate — Russian  Revolution  — 
War  session  of  Congress  —  State  of  war  —  Bibliographical  note. 

CHAPTER  XLVI II.  WAR  PREPARATION  478 

Council  of  National  Defense  —  Labor  and  the  war  —  Socialist  split  — 
Committee  on  Public  Information  —  Emergency  Fleet  Corporation 
—  Food  and  the  war  —  Hoover  and  Food  Administration  —  Raw 
materials  and  munitions  —  Aircraft  program  —  War  finance  —  First 
Liberty  Loan  —  Loans  to  Allies  —  Officers'  training  camps  —  Selec 
tive  service  —  Bibliographical  note. 

CHAPTER  XLIX.  LAUNCHING  THE  A.E.F.  489 

General  Pershing  —  Joffre  and  Balfour  —  Naval  participation  — 

Pershing  in  France  —  American  base  in  France  —  Divisions  of  1917 

-The  National  Army  —  Draft  and  officers'  training  camps  —  The 

Roosevelt  Division — The  Espionage  Act  —  War  risk  and  allowances 

—  Bibliographical  note. 

CHAPTER  L.  WAR  POLICIES  501 

New  conditions  of  warfare  —  Neutral  trade  —  The  War  Trade  Board 

—  Food  and  fuel  control  —  Revenue  Act  of  1917  —  Receipts,  expen 
ditures,  and  loans  —  Civilian  cooperation  —  People's  Council  for 
Democracy  —  National  unanimity  —  Bibliographical  note. 

CHAPTER  LI.  CONSERVATION  512 

The  winter  of  1917-18  —  Control  of  priorities  —  The  War  Industries 
Board  —  War  service  committees  —  Congestion  of  transport  —  Rail 
roads'  War  Board  —  Railroad  Administration  —  Fuelless  days — Sen- 


CONTENTS  xi 

ator  Chamberlain's  attack— The  Overman  Act— A  "War  Cabinet" 

—  Bibliographical  note. 

CHAPTER  LII.  WAR  AIMS  522 

Peace  overtures  of  1917  —  The  "Fourteen  Points"  —  The  Stockholm 
Conference  —  British  Labor  Manifesto  —  The  Brest-Litovsk  Peace 

—  "Force  without  limit "  —  Allies'  Purchasing  Commission  —  Inter- 
Ally  Finance  Council  —  Colonel  House's  "inquiry"  —  Inter-Allied 
Conference  —  Supreme  War  Council  —  Transport,  munitions,  and 
food  councils  —  Drive  of  1918  —  Foch  and  supreme  command  — 
Bibliographical  note. 

CHAPTER  LII  I.  WORK  OR  FIGHT  533 

Battle  of  1918  —  Labor  in  the  war  —  U.S.  Employment  Service  — 
Government  housing  —  National  War  Labor  Board  —  "Work  or 
Fight"  — •  Baruch  and  War  Industries  Board  —  Requirements, 
prices,  and  priorities  —  War  Finance  Corporation  —  Pittman  Silver 
Act  —  War  Department  reorganization  —  General  Goethals;  Divi 
sion  of  Purchase,  Storage,  and  Traffic  —  Eighteen  to  forty-five  draft 

—  Bibliographical  note. 

CHAPTER  LIV.  THE  AMERICANS  IN  FRANCE  543 

Training  program  of  A.E.F.  —  Quality  of  American  troops  —  German 
drives  —  Staff  supervision  —  Cantigny  —  Chateau-Thierry  —  The 
second  Marne  battle  —  Foch's  counter-attack  —  Allied  offensives  — 
First  American  Army  —  Samt-Mihiel  —  Meuse-Argonne  battle  — 
Central  Powers  collapse  —  German  armistice  —  Bibliographical 
note. 

CHAPTER  LV.  PEACE  AND  THE  LEAGUE  OF  NATIONS  555 

Congressional  election  of  1918  —  Republican  Party  reorganized  — 
"Unconditional  surrender"  —  American  Commission  to  Negotiate 
Peace  —  Europe  and  the  peace  —  Wilson,  Lloyd  George,  Clemenceau, 
and  Orlando  —  Covenant  of  the  League  of  Nations  —  Demobilization 
k  in  America  —  Wilson  back  in  Washington  —  Bibliographical  note. 

CHAPTER  LVI.  RECONSTRUCTION  566 

The  unsettled  world  —  Wilson  in  Paris  again  —  Compromises  of  the 
Peace  Conference  —  The  Senate  and  treaties  —  Opposition  to  the 
Treaty  of  Versailles  —  The  treaty  session  of  Congress  —  Fight  over 
ratification  —  Collapse  of  Wilson  —  High  prices  and  labor  unsettle- 
ment  —  Steel  strike  of  1919  —  Labor  conferences  and  radicalism  — 
Bibliographical  note. 

CHAPTER  LVII.  THE  ELECTION  OF  1920  578 

Eighteenth  and  Nineteenth  Amendments  —  International  finance, 
1920  —  Railroad  Control  Act  —  Wilson  and  the  "solemn  referen 
dum"  —  The  Hoover  boom  —  Harding  and  Coolidge  —  The  Army 
Act,  1920  —  The  Jones  Merchant  Marine  Act  —  The  Democratic 
candidates  —  Cox  and  Roosevelt  —  Third  party  movements  —  Busi 
ness  conditions  and  politics  —  Election  of  Harding  —  Bibliographical 
note. 

INDEX  589 


LIST  OF  MA^S 

THE  UNITED  STATES  IN  1870  (facing  page)        9 

THE  CARIBBEAN  253 

THE  PHILIPPINE  ISLANDS  257 

THE  AMERICAN  BASE  IN  FRANCE  493 

THE  BATTLE  OF  1918  545 

THE  UNITED  STATES   IN  1920  (facing  page)     581 


RECENT  HISTORY 
OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

•         • 

CHAPTER  I 

THE  BASIS  OF  PEACE 

"LET  us  have  peace,"  was  the  hope  of  Grant  when  he  ac 
cepted  his  first  nomination  for  the  presidency  of  the  United 
States,  but  the  obstacles  that  prevented  a  return  Inaugura. 
of  peace  to  the  hearts  and  lives  of  his  fellow-  tion  of 
countrymen  endured  through  the  next  eight 
years,  and  the  hope  unrealized  remained  to  inspire  his  suc 
cessor,  Rutherford  Birchard  Hayes,  nineteenth  President 
of  the  Republic.  When  that  successor  took  the  public  oath 
of  office  on  Monday,  March  5,  1877,  there  had  been  added 
to  the  irritation  of  the  sections  the  exasperation  of  a  party 
that  believed  the  presidency  to  have  been  stolen.  The 
most  ardent  of  his  adherents  could  make  no  surer  case  for 
his  election  than  that  his  inauguration  was  in  accordance 
with  the  law,  and  that  with  a  free  and  honest  vote  his  choice 
would  have  been  assured.  Only  the  fact  that  he,  with 
Grant,  believed  the  time  had  come  for  peace  gave  to  his 
term  a  promise  of  good  for  the  United  States. 

Peace  or  no  peace,  the  United  States  was  in  1877  tired  of 
its  past  —  though  it  had  recently  celebrated  its  centennial 
with  enthusiasm  —  and  eager  to  explore  its  future.  War 
and  panic  and  maladministration  had  left  scars  that  needed 
healing.  A  reconciliation  of  its  sections,  a  new  organization 
for  public  and  private  affairs,  a  free  religion,  and  a  better 
education  attracted  and  filled  the  public  mind.  While  poli 
ticians  scolded,  the  people  turned  their  hearts  against 
politics  for  a  decade  and  found  their  vital  interests  in  intel 
lectual  and  economic  reconstruction.  It  was  the  mission 
of  Hayes,  once  in  office,  to  facilitate  this  work.  From  the 


2        RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

day  he  formed  his  Cabinet  it  was  evident  that  a  change  had 
come. 

The  names  of  his  advisers,  undetermined  until  he  reached 
Washington,  and  unannounced  until  he  sent  them  to  the 
Cabinet  and  Senate,  contained  a  promise  for  the  future. 
Congress  William  M.  Evarts  brought  to  the  State  Depart 
ment  great  fame  as  a  lawyer  and  the  virtue  that  he  was  no 
man's  man  and  was  friendly  with  reformers.  He  was  bit 
terly  opposed  by  Senator  Roscoe  Conkling,  confidant  of 
Grant  and  leader  of  the  New  York  Republican  machine. 
The  propriety  of  John  Sherman's  appointment  to  the 
Treasury  was  heightened  by  his  long  association  with  finan 
cial  legislation  in  the  Senate.  In  the  War  Department 
George  W.  McCrary,  of  Iowa,  ousted  Don  Cameron,  son  of 
Simon  and  heir-apparent  to  the  Republican  political  ma 
chine  in  Pennsylvania,  whose  reappointment  Conkling  and 
the  elder  Cameron  wished  to  force. 

Richard  M.  Thompson,  an  old  Whig  spell-binder  of 
Indiana,  became  Secretary  of  the  Navy,  succeeding  Robe- 
son,  of  New  Jersey,  whom  the  last  House  had  not  impeached 
for  malfeasance  only  because  the  evidence  against  him  fell 
short  of  the  conclusive.  At  the  Post-Office,  which  Conk 
ling  had  wanted  for  Thomas  C.  Platt,  his  chief-of-staff,  was 
David  M.  Key,  who  was  a  hostage  of  peace  and  an  affront  to 
party  men  because  he  was  a  Tennesseean,  an  ex-Confeder 
ate,  and  even  a  Tilden  Democrat.  There  had  been  talk  of 
taking  General  Joe  Johnston  into  the  Cabinet,  but  Key  was 
the  final  choice.  The  cup  of  bitterness  was  filled  for  the 
steersmen  of  radical  Republicanism  by  the  selection  of  Carl 
Schurz  for  the  Interior  Department.  Schurz,  a  Liberal 
Republican  of  1872,  was  a  consistently  active  and  earnest 
reformer.  He  succeeded  Zachary  Chandler,  of  Michigan, 
who,  as  chairman  of  the  Republican  National  Committee 
in  1876,  managed  to  steer  a  national  campaign  without  hav 
ing  conference  or  correspondence  with  the  candidate  whom 
he  elected.  Judge  Charles  E.  Devens,  of  Massachusetts,  as 
Attorney-General,  completed  what  Wendell  Phillips,  strong- 
mouthed  as  ever,  soon  denounced  as  the  "slave-hound  Cab- 


THE  BASIS  OF  PEACE  3 

met."  From  Evarts  to  Devens  the  council  list,  equally 
displeasing  to  violent  radicals  and  to  men  grown  old  in  stal 
wart  manipulation  of  the  dominant  party,  proved  what 
Schurz  had  written,  that  the  Republican  Party  had  "nomi 
nated  a  man  without  knowing  it,"  and  that  Hayes  intended 
to  establish  peace. 

The  pledge  of  Hayes  in  his  inaugural  repeated  the  earlier 
promise  of  his  letter  of  acceptance  that  he  would  restore 
home  rule  to  the  South,  clean  up  the  national  administra 
tion,  and  maintain  the  public  credit.  With  advisers  iden 
tified  with  each  of  these  three  tasks,  but  with  a  Congress 
divided  against  itself,  he  set  to  work.  The  House  of  Repre 
sentatives,  Democratic  since  the  election  of  1874,  was  morc 
anxious  to  embarrass  the  Administration  than  to  do  its 
work;  and  in  the  Republican  Senate  the  President  had  few 
friends  after  he  sent  in  his  Cabinet  list,  Tuesday,  March  6. 
There  was  an  immediate  outbreak  of  wrath  at  the  trea 
son  to  his  party  seen  in  the  nominations.  'The  path  of 
reform  to  which  he  [Hayes]  is  pledged,"  said  the  most  im 
portant  of  Republican  papers,  the  New  York  Tribune,  "can 
go  only  over  the  ruins  of  the  average  Congressman's  dearest 
interests."  Elaine,  new  to  the  Senate,  to  which  he  had 
been  appointed  in  1876  after  thirteen  years  in  the  House, 
led  in  the  criticism  of  presidential  policy  and  in  defense  o 
Republican  control  of  the  South.  Conkling,  as  bitter  an 
enemy  as  Elaine  possessed,  joined  the  attack  less  from  dis 
approval  of  the  Southern  policy  than  from  patronage  resent 
ment.  Simon  Cameron,  chairman  of  the  Senate  Commit 
tee  on  Foreign  Relations,  was  unable  to  stop  the  confirma 
tion  of  Evarts  and  the  rest,  and  resigned  his  seat  in  the 
Senate;  but  showed  -that  he  —  the  "old  Winnebago  chief 
tain"  -  still  had  power  by  making  his  pliant  Pennsylvania 
legislature  choose  his  son,  J.  Donald  Cameron,  as  his  suc 
cessor.  The  members  of  the  Cabinet  received  their  con 
firmation  with  the  people  less  interested  than  their  leaders 
in  the  wrangle,  but  the  President  was  left  confronting  a 
gloating  opposition,  a  divided  party,  and  the  most  difficult 
of  civil  tasks. 


4        RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

In  eight  of  the  Confederate  States  white  control  had  been 
restored  before  Grant  left  the  presidency.  In  the  remaining 
Home  rule  tnree  there  were  contests  which  made  possible 
in  the  the  duplicate  electoral  returns  from  Florida, 

South  Carolina,  and  Louisiana,  upon  whose 
counting  the  fate  of  the  election  turned  in  1876.  In  two, 
Louisiana  and  South  Carolina,  the  Republican  State  Gov 
ernments  held  their  control  only  because  federal  troops,  sta 
tioned  in  their  state  houses  by  Grant,  deterred  the  Demo 
cratic  claimants  from  seizing  public  office.  The  deterring 
influence  was  moral  rather  than  physical,  since  of  the  whole 
regular  army,  listed  in  1876  as  28,571  officers  and  men,  only 
5885  were  within  the  limits  of  the  Confederacy,  and  more 
than  half  of  these  were  occupied  with  Indian  and  border 
patrol  duties  on  the  Texas  plains.  In  New  Orleans  there 
were  232  clerks,  officers,  and  men;  in  Columbia,  141. 

The  withdrawal  of  the  last  vestige  of  military  control 
from  the  Southern  States  was  bound  up  with  the  fate  of 
the  claimant  Governments.  In  both  South  Carolina  and 
Louisiana  the  canvass  of  1876  produced  fraud  to  fight  "bull 
dozing.  ' '  Intimidation  of  negroes  entitled  to  vote  under  the 
Fifteenth  Amendment  had  matched  fraud  in  counting  the 
returns.  In  each  State  there  were  both  official  and  contest 
ing  returns  upon  the  presidential  vote  as  well  as  upon  the 
local  vote.  The  Electoral  Commission,  declining  to  go  be 
hind  the  official  record,  had  counted  the  official  Republican 
vote  in  each  instance ;  but  the  people  themselves  had  organ 
ized  Democratic  State  Governments  in  Louisiana  and  South 
Carolina,  with  Grant  giving  official  countenance  and  pro 
tection  in  each  case  to  the  Republican  claimants;  to  Stephen 
B.  Packard  in  Louisiana  and  to  David  H.  Chamberlain  in 
South  Carolina. 

The  Packard  and  Chamberlain  Governments  were  both 
inaugurated  under  federal  patronage,  but  during  January 
and  February,  1877,  while  Congress  was  working  out  the 
basis  for  the  final  presidential  count,  it  became  clear  that 
the  Democratic  pretender  governors,  General  Wade  Hamp 
ton  in  South  Carolina  and  Francis  T.  Nicholls  in  Louisiana, 


THE  BASIS  OF  PEACE  5 

had  the  real  support.  There  was  no  possibility  for  a  unani 
mous  decision  upon  the  titles.  Each  house  of  Congress,  sole 
judge  under  the  Constitution  of  the  returns  of  its  own  mem 
bers,  seated  the  claimants  whom  the  majority  desired, 
Democratic  Representatives  in  one  case,  and  Senators 
chosen  by  the  Republican  legislatures  in  the  other.  The 
President  by  his  course  could  not  have  pleased  even  Con 
gress,  let  alone  all  the  people,  and  accordingly  he  followed 
the  course  that  Grant  had  already  outlined  for  him  before 
inauguration.  Grant  had  protected  the  establishment  of 
the  Republican  Governments,  had  maintained  the  peace, 
but  had  refrained  from  defending  either  Government  as 
legitimate.  Hayes  found  peace  prevailing  on  March  4,  and 
no  sign  of  an  insurrection  that  could  warrant  active  inter 
ference  by  the  Executive.  "If  all  the  people  whose  recog 
nition  amounts  to  anything  refuse  to  recognize  a  state 
government,  that  government  falls  of  its  own  weight," 
explained  the  New  York  Independent,  which  believed  with 
Elaine  that  the  legal  title  of  Chamberlain  and  Packard  was 
as  good  as  that  of  Hayes.  It  frankly  confessed  that  it  could 
not  see  "how  the  Federal  Government  can  by  a  standing 
army  take  permanent  care  of  a  majority  that  cannot  take 
care  of  itself."  In  this  view  the  great  body  of  Americans 
appears  to  have  concurred.  Some  believed  in  the  validity 
of  each  contestant,  but  most  were  also  ready  to  leave  the 
adjustment  to  be  worked  out  by  the  people  of  the  South. 

The  actual  steps  in  disentanglement  took  some  seven 
weeks.  On  April  3  the  Secretary  of  War  was  ordered  to 
remove  the  squad  of  troops  from  the  Columbia  State  House 
to  their  barracks,  and  on  April  20  similar  orders  cleared  the 
State  House  at  New  Orleans.  In  neither  case  did  insult  or 
outrage  follow  the  withdrawal.  The  effective  opinion  of  the 
States  in  question  upheld  the  Democratic  Governments,  as 
it  had  already  done  in  every  Southern  State.  The  dispos 
sessed  governors  came  North  to  attend  Republican  conven 
tions  and  pour  their  woes  into  willing  ears,  but  the  North 
was  no  longer  willing  to  fight ;  the  war  was  over.  The  South 
was  solid  and  the  United  States  had  turned  its  mind  from 


6       RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

strife  to  the  larger  tasks  of  peace.  In  vain  did  Elaine  shout 
in  the  Senate,  "You  discredit  Packard  and  you  discredit 
Hayes."  In  vain  did  he  hope  that  "there  shall  be  no  au 
thority  in  this  land  large  enough  or  adventurous  enough  to 
compromise  the  honor  of  the  national  administration  or 
the  good  name  of  the  great  republican  party  that  called 
that  administration  into  existence."  The  epoch  of  Elaine 
and  his  associates,  Conkling,  Grant,  Logan,  and  Cameron, 
had  passed.  The  new  realities  of  life  had  for  leaders  in  one 
direction  an  Astor,  a  Vanderbilt,  and  a  Gould;  in  another, 
an  Edison  and  a  Eell;  in  yet  another,  Eliot,  Angell,  Gilman, 
and  Alice  Freeman.  War  had  been  effective  only  in  pre 
venting  disunion;  national  unity  was  to  be  the  result  of 
business  and  education. 

Education,  as  the  underlying  problem  of  self-govern 
ment,  had  been  sensed  in  the  United  States  from  the  begin- 
Educa-  nm£-  The  first  action  of  the  old  Congress  look- 

tional  ing  toward  the  use  of  the  national  estate  had, 

in  the  Northwest  Ordinance  (1787),  pledged 
public  aid  to  the  common  schools,  and  when  issues  of  im 
migration  and  localization  arose  thereafter,  education  ap 
peared  to  provide  the  cure.  ' '  What  are  you  going  to  do  with 
all  these  things?"  Thomas  Huxley  asked,  at  the  opening  of 
Johns  Hopkins  University  in  1876:  "You  and  your  descend 
ants  will  have  to  ascertain  whether  this  great  mass  will 
hold  together  under  the  forms  of  a  republic  and  the  despotic 
reality  of  universal  suffrage."  The  university  that  he  was 
helping  to  launch  was  itself  convincing  evidence  of  the  pas 
sion  for  education  at  all  levels  and  in  all  directions  that  had 
begun  to  consume  the  American  people  during  the  Civil  War, 
and  that  brought  forth  new  enterprises  every  few  months 
from  1865,  when  the  Massachusetts  Institute  of  Technology 
and  Vassar  College  began  their  experiments,  until  the  middle 
eighties  when  the  university  had  been  differentiated  from 
the  college,  and  the  whole  system  of  education  was  in  full 
blast.  College,  university,  normal,  technical,  and  secondary 
education  were  at  work  upon  the  American  character. 

American  education  during  the  first  century  of  independ- 


THE  BASIS  OF  PEACE  7 

ence  was  narrower  in  fact  than  in  theory.  It  began  in  the 
district  school,  and  ended  there  for  most  of  the  population. 
In  the  older  communities  colleges,  generally  under  religious 
control,  carried  a  few  boys  on  to  law,  medicine,  and  theology. 
In  the  newer  regions,  where  land  grants  had  been  pledged 
to  public  education,  State  seminaries  and  universities  belied 
their  name,  and  did  the  work  of  indifferent  high  schools. 
Of  technical  training  there  was  almost  none  except  in  the 
United  States  Military  Academy  at  West  Point.  Railroad 
and  canal  promoters  turned  thither  for  chief  engineers,  who 
made  the  surveys,  and  often  retired  from  the  army  to  man 
age  the  roads.  George  B.  McClellan,  after  a  young  man's 
distinguished  career  in  the  regular  army,  was  president  of 
a  railroad  when  the  Civil  War  began. 

A  divorce  between  education  and  the  affairs  of  the  world 
grew  clearer  as  science  began  to  demand  recognition  in  the 
thirties.  Here  and  there  a  president  saw  the  need  for  a  wider 
angle  in  the  collegiate  vision.  Francis  Way  land  realized  it 
at  Brown,  whose  presidency  he  assumed  in  1826.  Horace 
Mann,  as  secretary  of  the  Massachusetts  Board  of  Educa 
tion,  worked  toward  it  after  1837.  But  the  general  mandate 
upon  the  college  president  was  that  he  should  be  a  father  to 
his  boys,  and  "by  timely  interference  prevent  bad  habits, 
detect  delinquencies,  and  administer  reproof  and  punish 
ment."  The  college  faculties  clung  to  the  old  precedents 
in  the  curriculum. 

College  education  declined  in  general  repute  in  the  middle 
of  the  nineteenth  century.     Perhaps  the  crystallization  of 
the  course,  perhaps  the  rejection  of  science,  perhaps  the  ar 
rogance  of  the  classics  caused* it;  but  whatever  the  reason, 
there  were  fewer  collegiate  students  in  1870  than  in  1830.  \ 
The  studies  of  F.  A.  P.  Barnard,  who  started  Columbia 
upon  a  modern  course  when  he  assumed  her  presidency  in 
1864,  give  the  estimate  that  in  1830  the  United  States  had 
645  such  students  per  million  of  population,  in  1850  only 
497,  and  in  1869  but  392.     An  effort  to  arrest  the  decline  - 
for  there  was  no  despair  of  education  —  brought  religion, 
capital,  and  the  frontier  spirit  into  conjunction. 


8       RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

In  the  summer  of  1862  Congress,  having  completed  its 
homestead  system  and  having  for  a  dozen  years  contributed 
Land-grant  directly  to  the  building  of  the  Western  railroads, 
colleges  passed  the  Morrill  Act  emlowing  in  every  State 
a  land-grant  college  of  agriculture  and  mechanic  arts.  Only 
a  handful  of  the  States  already  had  such  colleges,  the  Michi 
gan  Agricultural  College  ( 1 857)  at  Lansing  standing  out  as  the 
earliest  of  its  kind ;  but  every  State  accepted  the  proposed 
lands  and  applied  them  shortly  to  an  existent  college,  to  the 
State  university,  or  to  a  new  creation.  The  universities 
of  Wisconsin,  California,  Illinois,  and  Minnesota  received 
impetus  from  this  toward  a  new  curriculum  and  standard. 
In  New  York  the  subsidy  was  added  to  the  benefaction  of 
Ezra  Cornell  whose  university  opened  in  1868.  In  Pennsyl 
vania  the  new  State  college  was  chiefly  a  school  of  agricul 
ture.  In  Massachusetts  the  proceeds  were  divided  between 
an  agricultural  college  and  the  Institute  of  Technology. 

The  result  of  federal  policy  was  most  striking  in  the 
Western  schools,  but  it  was  real  throughout  the  whole 
Union.  As  the  agricultural  colleges  were  enlarged  and 
strengthened,  as  they  added  experiment  and  research,  and 
began  in  another  generation  to  show  positive  results  in  dis 
covery  and  invention,  they  tended  to  lessen  the  gap  that 
had  separated  education  and  life  before  the  Civil  War. 

The  growth  of  education  in  State  and  land-grant  univer 
sities  stimulated  the  religious  zeal  that  had  dotted  the 
Religious  country  with  its  foundations  since  colonial  days, 
colleges  In  the  East>  Hicksite  Friends  opened  their 

Swarthmore  College  in  18.69;  the  Congregationalist  college, 
Carleton,  at  Northfield,  Minnesota,  began  work  in  1870; 
the  Boston  University  of  the  Methodists  was  a  complete  and 
going  concern  by  1873,  as  was  the  Episcopal  University  of 
the  South  at  Sewanee,  Tennessee,  by  1876;  and  from  this 
time  until  the  munificence  of  John  D.  Rockefeller  reopened 
the  University  of  Chicago  under  Baptist  rule  in  1892  there 
was  continuous  pressure  to  stimulate  the  old  and  start  new 
projects  for  education  within  the  safeguards  of  religion. 

The  wealth  of  Americans  flowed  freely  into  all  of  these 


UNITED  STATES 
187O 


/ 


SCALE  OF  MILES 


0  100  200  300 

State  Capitals  in  this  type  Denver 

Cities  of  50,000  or  more  inhabitants  by  solid  dot*        \ 

EXPLANATION    OF   SHADING 
lll!!:!i!!l!lili!l!illi  10,000  feet  or  over  |  1 6,000  to  10,000  feet 

I  1 2,000  to  6,000  feet 

~  Railroads 


O 


ICO"  Lonj 


80* 


THE  BASIS  OF  PEACE  9 

activities  as  public  interest,  deadened  in  politics  in  the  sev 
enties,  turned  more  wholly  to  education  as  guarantee  for  the 
future.  The  average  citizen  resented  the  education  tax  less 
than  any  other.  The  private  purse  opened  voluntarily  to  the 
religious  college  and  the  non-sectarian  as  well  —  to  women,  to\ 
negroes,  to  poor  whites  at  the  South ,  and  to  the  new  vocations. 

Matthew  Vassar  was  not  the  first  to  desire  real  college 
discipline  for  girls,  but  his  college,  opened  at  Poughkeepsie 
in  1865,  is  a  great  landmark  in  the  education  of  Women's 
women  as  well  as  a  measuring-rod  for  their  at-  educatlon 
tainments.  The  long  existence  of  its  preparatory  depart 
ment  revealed  the  dearth  of  women  prepared  for  college. 
If  the  trustees  exacted  high  entrance  requirements  they 
could  not  fill  their  dormitories,  and  the  college  would  face 
financial  disaster.  If  they  filled  up  with  preparatory  stu 
dents  they  learned  that  the  discipline  and  type  of  teaching 
needed  by  girls  of  sixteen  spoiled  the  college  for  its  more 
mature  students.  Between  the  devil  of  bankruptcy  and  the 
deep  sea  of  the  young  ladies'  seminary  they  struggled  along 
for  many  years,  as  did  Wellesley,  which  opened  on  the  out 
skirts  of  Boston  in  1875.  More  fortunate  in  its  financial 
arrangements  was  the  college  that  grew  from  the  gift  of 
Sophia  Smith,  of  Northampton,  Massachusetts.  This  could 
afford  to  wait  to  test  its  conviction  that  girls  could  stand  the 
strain  of  Greek  as  well  as  boys.  It  opened  in  1875  with  only 
fourteen  freshmen,  whom  it  allowed  to  ripen  as  genuine 
collegians,  letting  in  a  new  class  of  freshmen  each  succeed 
ing  autumn  and  paying  the  full  price  for  a  high  standard 
fully  maintained.  A  decade  later,  when  Bryn  Mawr  College 
opened  its  doors,  the  preparatory  schools  had  caught  up, 
and  there  was  no  talk  of  letting  down  the  bars.  Instead  of 
this,  Bryn  Mawr  could  tell  of  the  duty  of  its  teachers  to 
be  men  of  industry  and  research,  professionally  instead  of 
accidentally  drawn  into  their  college  work. 

In  the  West  the  women  had  an  easier  entry  into  the  field 
of  higher  education.  Here  the  frontier  had  clarified  the 
rights  of  women  and  here  the  colleges  were  new,  lacking 
tradition  of  exclusive  masculinity;  and  here  by  1870  it  had 


io      RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

become  the  general  practice  to  co-educate  the  boys  and 
girls.  Women  entered  the  men's  collegiate  course.  In  in 
creasing  numbers  the  experiment  of  co-education  was  tried, 
with  no  bad  consequences.  Spurred  by  the  activities  of  the 
women's  colleges  in  the  East  and  co-education  in  the  West, 
Harvard  and  Columbia  felt  a  need  to  extend  their  work. 
The  "Annex"  at  Harvard  offered  its  first  courses  in  1879 
and  developed  into  Radcliffe  College  a  little  later.  At 
Columbia  the  admonitions  of  President  Barnard  to  take 
like  action  were  long  in  vain,  but  when  the  women  got  their 
college  it  received  his  name.  In  1882  thirteen  colleges  and 
universities,  all  doing  men's  work  for  women,  shared  in  the 
formation  of  the  Association  of  Collegiate  Alumnae. 

The  part  education  was  to  play  in  the  real  reconstruction 
of  the  South  impressed  the  imagination  at  an  early  date. 
Education  Under  the  protection  of  the  Freedmen's  Bureau 
of  negroes  schools  were  opened  almost  before  the  echoes 
of  the  guns  were  silent.  In  1867  George  Peabody  handed 
over  to  a  group  of  notable  trustees  a  fund  to  help  the  ' '  more 
destitute  portions  of  the  Southern  and  Southwestern  States 
of  our  Union."  From  this  fund  negro  schools  and  normal 
schools  were  aided  and  encouraged  year  after  year.  In 
1875  a  normal  college  at  Nashville  became  the  largest  single 
interest  of  the  fund,  which,  in  another  generation,  passed 
its  remaining  assets  to  this  college  and  wound  up  its  work. 
John  F.  Slater,  of  Connecticut,  inaugurated  a  friendly  rivalry 
to  Peabody  when  he  set  aside  a  million  dollars  in  1882  for 
"the  uplifting  of  the  lately  emancipated  people  of  the  Sou  th 
em  States."  Booker  T.Washington  began,  with  small  equip 
ment  and  a  large  vision,  in  1881,  his  Tuskegee  experiment  of 
self-help  for  negroes. 

The  growth  of  professional  education  fills  the  same  two 
decades  after  the  Civil  War.  Agriculture,  engineering, 
Professional  law,  and  teaching  shifted  to  a  new  basis  of  inter-, 
education  es£  an(j  popularity.  The  normal  schools  multi 
plied  and  grew  into  the  teachers'  college.  The  high  school 
entered  upon  its  duicate  mission  mediating  between  the 
needs  of  the  common  school  and  the  exactions  of  the  over- 


THE  BASIS  OF  PEACE  11 

shadowing  university.  Its  task  grew  in  volume  and  diffi 
culty  as  a  prosperous  nation  sent  ever  larger  numbers  of  its 
children  into  the  high  school,  in  which  it  had  full  confidence, 
and  on  into  the  university  where  its  uncertainties  wrere  grow 
ing  less.  From  392  to  the  million  of  population,  when  Bar 
nard  examined  the  figures  of  higher  education  in  1869,  the 
ratio  of  attendance  rose  to  1161  in  1880,  and  to  1913  in 
1900,  with  endowment,  equipment,  and  public  interest 
growing  in  proportion. 

The  renascence  of  American  education  began  simultane-  j 
ously  with  the  legislation  of  the  sixties,  which  created  the  \ 
land-grant  colleges  in  1862  and  a  United  States  Bureau  of 
Education  in  1867.  The  stream  of  private  benefactions 
that  still  flows  unchecked  began  its  run.  Public  leaders  in 
education  formed  a  new  school  of  college  teachers  who  were 
neither  pedants  nor  pedagogues,  but  were  statesmen  in  the 
best  sense.  Charles  W.  Eliot,  beginning  his  reign  at  Har 
vard  in  1869,  was  the  most  prominent  of  these,  but  at  his 
side  were  White  at  Cornell  and  McCosh  at  Princeton  (1868), 
Angell  at  Michigan  and  Porter  at  Yale  (1871),  Alice  Free 
man  at  Wellesley  (1882),  and  Gilman  at  Johns  Hopkins 
(1876),  Pepper  at  Pennsylvania  (1881)  and  Northrop  at 
Minnesota  (1885);  while  the  newly  inspired  universities 
were  training  Wilson,  Lowell,  James,  Jordan,  and  Van  Hise 
to  take  the  lead  a  generation  later. 

At  Johns  Hopkins  University  the  new  education  made 
its  special  imprint.  The  great  teachers  of  the  old  colleges 
had  been  drafted  from  the  clergy,  with  only  johns 

general  preparation  for  their  work.    Beginning    Hopkins 

u          Ai.     *!•_•••      *.!_          i      j  j     i  University 

about  the  thirties  there  had  come  now  and  then 

young  men  inspired  with  science  and  scholarship  from  the 
German  universities.  Only  in  the  seventies  did  advanced 
work  in  America  become  possible.  There  were  in  1850 
eight  graduate  students  recorded  in  the  United  States,  said 
Ira  Remsen  in  his  Johns  Hopkins  inaugural  in  1902;  and  in 
1875  but  399.  By  1900  there  were  5668,  in  whose  produc 
tion  and  training  no  one  had  surpassed^ the  predecessor  of 
Remsen  at  Johns  Hopkins  —  Daniel  Coit  Gilman, 


12      RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

It  was  Gilman  who  shaped  the  graduate  university  for 
which  Johns  Hopkins  gave  three  and  one  half  millions  to 
Baltimore  and  the  South,  founding  its  leadership  not  upon 
a  shell  of  buildings,  but  upon  teachers  and  scholars.  Here 
Gildersleeve  and  Martin  and  Adams  trained  the  graduates 
who  filtered  into  the  new  faculties  of  the  eighties,  and  dis 
turbed  the  tranquillity  of  the  old  with  their  ideas  of  re 
search.  It  was  science  and  scholarship,  not  irreligious,  but 
without  religious  bias.  The  inaugural  orator,  Thomas  Hux 
ley,  in  1876,  by  his  presence  indicated  the  courage  of  Gil- 
man's  scientific  conviction,  for  evolutionists  were  in  dis 
repute  and  even  Charles  Darwin  had  not  yet  received  his 
Cambridge  LL.D.  Science  was  on  the  program  at  Johns 
Hopkins,  but  not  prayer;  and  to  one  who  complained  of  the 
lack  of  the  latter  a  clergyman  aptly  answered:  "It  was  bad 
enough  to  invite  Huxley.  It  were  better  to  have  asked  God 
to  be  present.  It  would  have  been  absurd  to  ask  them 
both." 

The  warfare  of  science  and  religion  was  at  its  height  when 
Hayes  became  President,  but  society  was  clearly  turning 
to  education  to  solve  its  problems.  "What  is  the  signifi 
cance  of  all  this  activity?"  asked  Gilman  at  the  opening  of 
his  university:  "It  is  a  reaching  out  for  a  better  state  of 
society  than  now  exists ;  ...  it  means  a  wish  for  less  misery 
among  the  poor,  less  ignorance  in  schools,  less  bigotry  in 
religion,  less  suffering  in  the  hospital,  less  fraud  in  business, 
less  folly  in  politics;  it  means  more  love  of  art,  more  lessons 
from  history,  more  security  in  property,  more  health  in 
cities,  more  virtue  in  the  country,  more  wisdom  in  legisla 
tion;  it  implies  more  intelligence,  more  happiness,  more 
religion." 

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL  NOTE 

James  Ford  Rhodes,  History  of  the  United  States  from  Hayes  to  McKinley, 
1877-1896  (1919),  is  volume  vm  of  his  monumental  and  invaluable  work. 
John  W.  Burgess,  Administration  of  President  Hayes  (1916),  is  a  sketchy 
continuation  of  his  writings  on  the  Civil  War.  Paul  L.  Haworth,  The 
Hayes-Til  den  Election  of  1876  (1906),  gives  the  best  view  of  the  electoral 
contest;  his  United  States  in  Our  Own  Times,  1865-1920  (1920),  contains  a 


THE  BASIS  OF  PEACE  13 

general  narrative  of  the  period,  which  may  be  studied  from  a  different  angle 
In  Charles  A.  Beard,  Contemporary  American  History  (1914),  and  Charles 
R.  Lingley,  Since  the  Civil  War  (1920).  Charles  R.  Williams,  Rutherford 
Birchard  Hayes  (1914),  is  a  definitive  work  based  upon  the  correspondence 
and  diary  of  the  President.  James  G.  Elaine,  Twenty  Years  of  Congress 
(1884),  was  for  many  years  the  standard  Republican  history  of  its  period. 
The  educational  renascence  may  be  studied  in  James  B.  Angell,  Reminis 
cences  (1910);  Fabian  Franklin,  Daniel  Coit  Oilman  (1910);  George  H. 
Palmer,  Alice  Freeman  Palmer  (1908),  one  of  the  most  charming  American 
biographies;  Andrew  D.  White,  Autobiography  (1905);  Arnold  Haultain, 
Selections  from  Goldwin  Smith'-s  Correspondence  [1846-1912]  (n.d.):  and 
Scott  and  Stowe,  Booker  T.  Washington  (1916),  which  supplements  the 
view  of  negro  progress  given  in  Booker  T.  Washington,  Up  from  Slavery 
(1905)- 


CHAPTER  II 

CIVIL  AND  BORDER  STRIFE 

THE  army  of  the  United  States,  fixed  by  law  in  the  last 
year  of  the  Grant  Administration  at  a  maximum  strength 
Deadlock  °^  25»°°°>  was  released  from  one  of  its  duties 
over  army  by  the  Southern  policy  of  President  Hayes.  It 
was  no  longer  obliged  to  police  the  South.  And 
its  members  were  no  longer  certain  of  their  livelihood,  for 
the  outgoing  Congress  in  1877  na-d  deadlocked  over  the  use 
of  troops  as  posse  for  civil  purposes,  and  the  Democratic 
House  had  defeated  the  army  appropriation  bill  rather  than 
concede  a  duty  to  protect  the  voting  rights  of  citizens  or  to 
defend  the  peace.  From  William  Tecumseh  Sherman  at 
its  head,  down  the  long  list  of  general  officers  whose  names 
suggested  a  roster  of  Union  victories,  the  army  was  hated 
at  the  South  —  and  not  loved  even  at  the  North.  A  special 
session  of  Congress  to  vote  their  pay  was  announced  soon 
after  the  inauguration,  but  many  more  events  were  to  draw 
notice  to  the  army  before  October  15,  1877,  when  that  Con 
gress  met. 

With  the  remote  world  America  was  in  profound  peace, 
and  the  last  of  the  settlements  with  Great  Britain  under  the 
Treaty  of  Washington  was  nearly  reached.  This  was  the 
Halifax  arbitration  of  the  value  to  Canada  of  certain  rights 
in  the  St.  Lawrence  fisheries,  claimed  and  wanted  by  New 
England.  The  award  on  November  23,  1877,  failed  to 
please  the  United  States,  but  it  at  least  closed  one  aspect  of 
the  case;  while  throughout  Canada  events  were  pointing 
toward  a  new  relationship  —  annexation. 

From  an  early  period  in  the  century  all  of  Canada  was 
conscious  of  the  nearness  of  the  United  States,  if  only 
Canadian  through  the  anti-American  feelings  of  those 
annexation  exiled  tories  who,  as  United  Empire  Loyalists, 
had  been  colonized  in  New  Brunswick  and  Ontario  after 


CIVIL  AND  BORDER  STRIFE  15 

the  Revolutionary  War.  Upper  Canada  had  felt  the  near 
ness  during  the  rebellion  of  1837,  when  New  York  proved  a 
convenient  recruiting  ground  for  rebels;  and  both  Upper 
and  Lower  Canada  served  through  the  sixties  as  a  base  for 
Confederate  attacks  upon  the  American  border,  or  as  an 
objective  for  Fenian  raids  by  American  Irishmen  upon  the 
territory  of  Great  Britain.  Beyond  the  Great  Lakes  the 
Canadian  Northwest  was  nearer  to  St.  Paul  than  to  any 
other  center  of  population,  and  derived  its  annual  supplies 
over  the  trail  thence  to  Red  River.  Its  urgent  pressure 
forwarded  the  railroad  construction  that  laid  the  founda 
tions  for  the  fortunes  of  Lord  Strathcona  and  James  J.  Hill. 
The  approaching  completion  of  an  American  Pacific  rail 
way  in  the  later  sixties  drove  Canadians  to  urge  a  Pacific 
railway  of  their  own,  or,  failing  that,  incorporation  with 
America.  The  Dominion  Act  with  its  impetus  to  the 
imperial  bond  came  simultaneously  with  the  purchase  of 
Alaska  (1867)  which  made  America  Canada's  neighbor  at 
another  corner.  All  through  the  seventies  Canadian  politics 
were  filled  with  imperialism  as  the  alternative  to  annexation. 
The  latter  policy  had  the  valiant  aid  of  Goldwin  Smith, 
professor  at  Toronto  and  once  regius  professor  at  Oxford. 
Smith  had  been  imported  to  the  LTnited  States  by  Andrew 
D.  White  to  aid  in  building  the  new  university  at  Ithaca 
(Cornell),  and  had  soon  crossed  the  border  to  live  in  Can 
ada,  retaining  meanwhile  a  wide  acquaintance  in  and  a 
keen  understanding  of  America.  A  Canadian  election  of 
1878  brought  Sir  John  A.  MacDonald  and  imperial  protection 
back  to  power,  but  annexation  and  its  various  substitutes 
continued  to  clamor  on  the  northern  border  for  another 
fifteen  years. 

There  was  no  talk  of  annexation  coming  out  from  Mexico. 
Here,  instead,  a  new  dictator  was  struggling  to  establish 
his  government  and  to  prevent  the  United  States    Mexican 
from  acquiring  an  excuse  for  intervention.     Por-    Revolution 
firio  Diaz  proclaimed  himself  provisional  presi 
dent  in  November,   1876,  and  proceeded  to  demand  im 
mediate  recognition  from  the  United  States  through  John 


16      RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

W.  Foster,  the  American  Minister.  It  was  the  disposi 
tion  of  Grant  to  recognize  at  once,  but  Foster  held  off,  dis 
cussing  first  the  measure  of  control  that  the  new  president 
possessed  over  his  army  and  his  uflenthusiastic  subjects. 
Along  the  Rio  Grande  this  control  was  a  matter  of  critical 
importance. 

For  many  years  before  the  revolution  of  1876  the  United 
States  had  complained  of  the  inability  of  Mexico  to  police 
the  stretch  of  territory  from  El  Paso,  where  the  Del  Norte 
emerges  from  the  mountain  trough  of  New  Mexico,  to 
Brownsville  and  Matamoros,  where  it  empties  into  the 
Gulf.  West  of  El  Paso  there  was  friction,  more  or  less,  but 
there  were  too  few  Americans  to  make  it  menacing.  The 
Southern  Pacific  Railroad  had  not  yet  crossed  the  Colorado 
River  into  Arizona,  and  even  bad  Mexican  " greasers"  could 
do  little  damage  there.  But  below  El  Paso  there  were  iso 
lated  tracts  of  settlement  on  each  side  of  the  river,  which  as 
yet  no  railroad  touched  or  even  approached,  with  a  "dense 
chaparral  of  cactus,  Spanish  dagger,  mesquite,  and  other 
similar  plants"  in  the  interstices  where  there  was  not  actual 
desert.  Here  cattle  throve,  and  cattle  thieves  abounded 
who  forded  the  river  and  ran  off  American  stock,  leaving 
behind  too  often  a  trail  of  burning  ranches,  slaughtered 
owners,  and  mutilated  women  and  children.  "Our  people 
are  murdered, "t  complained  Governor  Hubbard  of  Texas 

J^a*f**-^"*7~/ 

in  1878,  "their  property  stolen,  and,  with  but  rare  excep 
tions,  our  claims  iar~redress  are  met  with  indifference,  and 
our  demands  for  fugitive  thieves  and  murderers  laughed  to 
scorn  from  the  opposite  side  of  a  shallow  river,  and  almost 
within  sight  of  their  victims." 

The  recognition  that  Diaz  demanded  was  deferred  until 
April,  1878,  and  until  new  measures  to  protect  the  Texas 
border  had  been  taken  by  President  Hayes.  Most  of  the 
regular  troops  remaining  in  the  South  in  April,  1877,  when 
they  were  finally  detached  from  Southern  police  duty,  were 
on  the  border  of  Texas,  stewing  in  the  sun  and  chasing  ban 
dits.  Their  attempts  to  secure  cooperation  with  the  Diaz 
troops  were  vain.  On  June  i,  1877,  by  order  of  Hayes, 


CIVIL  AND  BORDER  STRIFE  17 

General  Ord,  who  commanded  in  Texas,  was  directed  to 
disregard  the  Rio  Grande  and  to  pursue  thieves  over  the 
international  boundary  into  Mexico.  With  solemn  words 
the  Mexican  Government  protested  this  invasion  of  its 
sovereignty,  but  the  raids  soon  lessened  under  the  vigorous 
pursuits  of  Lieutenant-Colonel  W.  R.  Shafter.  The  ene 
mies  of  the  Administration  avowed  that  this  was  war,  and 
that  the  South,  in  the  saddle  again,  was  desirous  to  redress 
the  balance  of  the  Union  by  forcible  annexation.  But 
Hayes  stood  firmly  by  his  policy,  and  in  his  own  good  time 
gave  recognition  to  the  great  Mexican  dictator?  ftt^fferv'fr 

The  Southern  vote,  clamoring  in  Congress  for  army  re 
duction  and  getting  it  in  1876,  fighting  the  police  duties 
and  leaving  the  troops  unpaid,  had  nevertheless  wanted  this 
Texas  patrol  kept  to  the  front  and  the  cavalry  regiments 
recruited  for  this  purpose  to  full  strength.  Another  West 
ern  duty  in  the  summer  of  1877  revealed  again  the  depend 
ence  of  the  United  States  upon  an  army  and  the  straits  to 
which  sectional  politics  had  reduced  it. 

There  had  been  no  systematic  Indian  wars  for  several 
years  before  1876,  the  campaigns  between  1864  and  1868 
and  the  general  peace  negotiations  of  1 867  having  Indian  wars, 
marked  the  end  of  a  period  of  general  restlessness.  l8?6~77 
In  1876,  however,  the  Dakota  Sioux,  exasperated  by  pros 
pectors  in  the  Black  Hills  region,  gave  pretext  for  a  punitive 
campaign.  A  column  under  General  Custer  was  destroyed 
on  the  Little  Big  Horn  early  in  this  enterprise,  and  Sitting 
Bull  with  his  followers  escaped  to  a  refuge  in  Canada. 
Unwelcome  guests,  but  not  expelled  from  Canada,  the 
Sioux  braves  were  in  1877  negotiating  for  a  return  to  the 
United  States.  In  June  the  Nez  Perces  of  Idaho  followed 
them  upon  the  war  path. 

The  grievances  of  the  Nez  Perces  were  trespass  and  ex 
tortion,  and  excited  the  commiseration  of  even  their  official 
scourge,  General  O.  O.  Howard.  They  were  the  guiltless 
victims  not  of  special  malice,  but  of  the  relentless  frontier 
that  had  ever  pushed  over  the  obstructions  in  its  way,  and 
of  the  weakness  of  administration  that  left  the  army  too 


18      RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

small  for  an  Indian  police  and  poorly  adapted  to  it.  In  Can 
ada  the  Royal  Mounted  Police  had  little  trouble  with  their 
wards,  doing  with  twos  and  threes  what  whole  regiments  of 
cavalry  found  trying  tasks  on  the  American  side.  Toward 
Canada  Chief  Joseph  of  the  Nez  Perces  started,  once  actual 
hostilities  began  in  June,  1877.  The  raid  began  in  the 
Clearwater  country  of  Idaho;  thence  across  that  State  and 
Montana,  too,  went  the  fugitive,  with  General  Howard  in 
pursuit  until  Chief  Joseph  was  maneuvered  into  the  arms  of 
Colonel  Nelson  A.  Miles  in  October.  To  reenforce  Howard 
it  was  necessary  to  send  a  regiment  from  Atlanta,  Georgia, 
and  unpaid  at  that.  The  public  remained  indifferent  to 
General  McClellan's  plea  that  it  cost  nearly  as  much  to 
transport  troops  such  great  distances  as  would  keep  a  rea 
sonable  army  on  the  ground. 

The  greatest  of  the  military  emergencies  of  1877  occurred 
not  on  the  border  or  among  the  sullen  and  outraged  Indians, 
Social  but  in  the  most  populous  and  wealthy  region  in 

the  East,  where  outbreaks  in  July  caused  thought 
ful  men  to  ask  whether  government  itself  could  last  in  the 
face  of  threatened  revolution.  The  railroad  strikes  along  the 
Baltimore  and  Ohio  and  the  Pennsylvania  lines,  and  ex- 
.  tending  to  their  neighbors,  brought  a  new  element  into  the 
lAmerican  situation  —  that  of  a  class  struggle  with  revolu 
tionary  ideals  fighting  the  existing  order.    Socialism  and 
,1     anarchy  abroad,  with  the  recollection  of  the  excessesjof  com- 
V    munism  in  Paris  after  the  last  war,  disturbed  many  minds. 
TourgenierFs    Virgin  Soil  was  among  the  newer  books, 
through  whose  pages  the  reader  could  see  into  the  vortex 
of  social  unrest. 

The  immediate  cause  of  the  railroad  strikes  of  1877  was  a 
general  reduction  of  wages,  effective  July  I,  and  occasioned 
by  hard  times  with  shrinking  freight  receipts.  The  panic 
of  1873  caught  the  American  railroads  overbuilt.  The  en 
suing  depression  forced  many  of  them  into  bankruptcy,  to 
emerge  from  which  they  reorganized,  sacrificing  in  turn 
stockholders,  bondholders,  and,  finalfy,  employees.  These 
last  fought  against  the  reduction,  led  by  the  Brotherhood 


CIVIL  AND  BORDER  STRIFE  19 

of  Locomotive  Engineers,  and  countenanced  by  labor  so  far 
as  it  was  organized. 

The  labor  movement,  with  its  resulting  stratification  of 
society,  left  the  United  States  almost  untouched  until  the 
middle  of  the  nineteenth  century.  An  agricultural  people, 
with  unlimited  free  land  on  its  margin,  expected  the  normal 
citizen  to  work  for  his  parents  in  youth ;  then  to  work  awhile 
for  wages;  then  to  marry  and  make  a  farm  somewhere. 
There  was  never  enough  labor  for  the  ordinary  crafts  of  non- 
industrial  society,  and  no  man  of  industry  was  driven  long 
to  work  at  an  uncongenial  job.  It  accordingly  happened 
that  unions  of  laborers  were  local  and  temporary,  few  reach 
ing  wide  or  permanent  organization  before  the  Civil  War. 
The  crisis  induced  by  high  and  fluctuating  prices,  as  the  cur 
rency  dropped  in  the  last  year  of  the  war  to  thirty-five  cents 
on  the  dollar,  and  aggravated  by  the  over-supply  of  labor 
as  the  armies  returned  to  civil  life,  gave  the  shock  that 
crystallized  out  of  society  organized  labor  on  a  large  scale. 

The  organization  of  national  trade  unions  progressed 
far  enough  during  the  Civil  War  to  make  possible  the 
consideration  of  a  general  federation.  After  va-  National 
rious  caucuses  held  by  the  unionists  a  group  of  Labor 
some  fifty  delegates  of  national  crafts  met  at  the 
Front  Street  Theater  in  Baltimore  and  formed  a  National 
Labor  Union  in  August,  i86d.  For  several  years  thereafter 
the  annual  congresses  of  this  body  considered  the  obtainable 
needs  of  labor,  and  struggled  against  the  efforts  of  other 
agitators  to  graft  their  reforms  upon  the  labor  stem.  The 
eight-hour  day  was  an  immediate  objective,  as  were  factory 
laws  and  statistical  studies.  In  the  meeting  of  1867  the  in 
fluence  of  German  socialists  was  noted,  and  an  idea  of  re 
pudiating  the  national  debt  took  root.  The  next  year,  with 
an  estimated  membership  of  640,000  in  member  unions,  the 
National  Labor  Union  reached  the  crest  of  its  importance. 
After  this  it  lost  its  single  devotion  to  labor  problems.  It 
flirted  with  women's  rights,  adopted  an  outright  political 
problem,  and  became  forerunner  to  the  independent  party 
of  Greenbackers  that  emerged  in  1876.  It  lost  its  grip  on 


20     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

labor  as  it  broadened  its  aims.  After  1872,  when  the  Na 
tional  Labor  Party  and  the  National  Prohibition  Party 
were  born  simultaneously  at  Columbus,  it  died.  But  it  set 
a  pace  for  labor  in  the  fat  years  o£  the  later  sixties ;  and  in 
the  lean  years  after  the  panic  of  1873  it  was  an  inspiration 
for  imitators. 

/The  history  of  unionism  is  embedded  in  conscious  secrecy 
during  these  years.  Many  employers  dismissed  known 
unionists  on  sight  and  had  favorable  public  opinion  behind 
them.  "If  they  [the  National  Labor  Congress  of  1868] 
could  .  .  .  banish  from  their  discussion  the  idea  of  a  necessary 
and  inherent  enmity  between  Capital  and  Labor,  it  would 
be  a  great  step  toward  the  end  they  seek,"  said  Horace 
Greeley's  paper.  "  Having  left  the  service  of  the  com 
pany,"  wrote  another  observer  of  a  great  strike,  "they  [the 
strikers]  should  have  recognized  the  fact  that  they  had  no 
longer  any  interest  in  its  action,  and  should  have  sought 
employment  elsewhere."  And  a  Wall  Street  journal,  ex 
pressing  the  most  stubborn  of  the  anti-labor  opinions,  said, 
as  late  as  1877,  "the  only  injustice  a  railroad  can  inflict  upon 
its  men  is  to  neglect  paying  them." 

With  public  opinion  averse  to  their  existence  and  approv 
ing  their  destruction,  the  promoters  of  unionism  had  the  al 
ternatives  of  secrecy  and  starvation ;  but  the  reclassincation 
of  society  due  to  the  entry  of  the  factory  could  not  but  com 
pel  them  to  strive  for  better  things.  Too  often  they  were 
injured  by  the  confusion  of  darkness.  The  secrecy  in  which 
they  must  be  cloaked  was  used  by  less  worthy  movements 
for  less  desirable  ends.  In  Pennsylvania,  among  the  anthra 
cite  miners,  the  discovery  of  a  secret  murderous  society  dis 
credited  for  a  time  all  labor  organizations. 

The  "Molly  Maguires"  started  a  reign  of  terror  in  the 
anthracite  region  early  in  the  sixties.  The  demand  of  the 
The  "Molly  Eastern  cities  for  hard  coal  attracted  thither 
Maguires"  jarge  quantities  of  unskilled  labor,  much  of  it 
Irish,  during  the  sixties  and  early  seventies.  The  social 
conditions  in  the  mining  towns  were  always  bad,  but  the 
labor  was  so  fluctuating  in  personnel  and  the  distinction 


CIVIL  AND  BORDER  STRIFE  21 

between  the  miner  and  his  unskilled  helpers  so  sharp,  that 
unionism  took  root  slowly.  The  " Mollies"  tried  to  do  by 
terror  what  unions  might  have  done  by  open  dealings.  They 
beat  and  murdered  unpopular  foremen,  bosses,  or  owners, 
and  in  their  secret  way  they  became  an  agent  as  often  for 
private  malice  as  for  group  action.  Their  reign  was  never 
even  threatened  until  James  McParlan,  a  courageous  de-  v 
tective,  entered  the  district  in  1874.  f  vvuttK«~  f  — 

McParlan,  in  disguise,  became  a  "Mollie"  and  worked 
his  way  into  the  confidence  of  the  inner  ring  of  murderers. 
When  the  time  was  ripe,  he  turned  in  his  evidence  against 
the  leaders.  In  May,  1876,  he  threw  off  his  disguise  and  took 
the  stand  against  one  of  them  on  trial  for  murder,  and  in  his 
testimony  let  the  people  see  the  crime  that  had  existed. 
Against  intimidation,  threat,  and  public  pressure  he  con 
tinued  his  work  for  law  and  order,  and  the  governor  of 
Pennsylvania,  Hartranft,  refused  to  call  him  off.  In  the 
end,  Mauch  Chunk  and  Pottsville  were  the  scene  of  eleven 
hangings  of  the  conspirators,  the  first  executions  in  a  series 
of  murder  scandals  running  freely  since  1865.  This  was  in 
June,  1877.  It  prepared  the  public  mind  to  believe  any  bad 
tale  about  a  secret  order  and  to  consider  a  union  of  workers 
as  a  menace  to  society.  In  the  same  weeks  events  were 
preparing  for  a  general  strike. 

The  organization  of  railroad  employees  came  at  an  early 
stage  in  the  union  movement.     They  were  a  new  and  grow 
ing  class.     The  engineers,  firemen,  and  conduc-    Rauroacj 
tors  were   responsible  and    skilled.      Their  in-    strikes  of 
dustry  was   receiving   recognition   as   basic   in 
national  development,  and  the  engineers  since   1863  had 
been  organized.      In  this  year  their  national  union,  the 
Brotherhood   of  the   Footboard,    appeared,    changing    its 
name  in  1864  to  the  Grand  International  Brotherhood  of 
Locomotive  Engineers.      In  1874  P-  M.  Arthur  assumed 
direction  of  their  affairs  as  grand  master  engineer.      In 
April,  1877,  came  a  strike  on  the  Philadelphia  and  Reading, 
a  coal  carrier  whose  president,  Franklin  M.  Gowen,  was 
at  that  moment  acquiring,  in  his  fight  against  the  "  Mollies" 


22      RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

in  his  mines,  an  intolerance  of  all  organization  among  his 
employees.  No  wage  question  was  immediately  involved, 
but  Gowen  announced  in  March  that  all  his  engineers  must 
choose  between  the  railroad  and  the  Brotherhood.  In  re 
sponse  to  this  the  engineers  took  their  locomotives  into  the 
roundhouses  at  midnight,  April  14,  1877,  and  went  on  strike. 
In  both  of  these  strikes  non-union  men  took  out  the  engines 
almost  before  their  fires  were  cold,  and  detention  of  travel 
was  slight.  In  July,  however,  President  Hayes  and  the 
governors  of  four  States  called  upon  the  troops  at  their 
command  to  control  the  violence  incidental  to  the  more 
ominous  outbreak  on  the  line  of  the  Baltimore  and  Ohio. 

No  industrial  uprising  since  the  Chartist  demonstration 
of  1848,  when  the  old  Duke  of  Wellington  barricaded  Lon 
don  against  the  mob,  so  greatly  disturbed  the  comfortable 
elements  of  society  as  this  strike  that  began  in  Baltimore 
and  Martinsburg  on  Monday,  July  16,  1877.  The  wage 
reductions  effective  on  all  the  trunk  lines  were  the  occasion, 
and  when  the  company  tried  to  move  its  trains  with  non 
union  crews,  their  course  was  impeded  by  riotous  mobs. 
Trains  were  stopped,  crews  were  assaulted,  cars  and  coaches 
were  overturned,  and  arson  was  added  to  violence  and 
murder.  How  far  the  strikers  were  personally  guilty  does 
not  appear.  In  all  the  railroad  towns  there  was  sharp  dis 
content  because  of  slack  times  or  unemployment.  There 
were,  too,  crowds  of  boys  and  hoodlums.  The  tramp  nui 
sance,  much  commented  on  in  this  summer,  provided  out 
casts  ready  for  violence  and  theft.  And  the  result  was  out 
rage  that  recalled  the  Civil  War  and  seemed  to  foretell 
another  social  cataclysm. 

By  Tuesday,  July  17,  Baltimore  was  under  control,  with 
trains  running  locally;  but  the  governors  of  Maryland  and 
West  Virginia  had  called  out  their  militia  and  besought 
aid  of  the  United  States.  Martinsburg  was  in  possession  of 
the  mob.  The  next  day  Hayes,  by  proclamation,  warned 
the  mobs  to  cease  obstruction,  and  squads  of  troops  were 
scraped  together  from  the  thin  Eastern  garrisons  and  hur 
ried  to  centers  of  disturbance.  At  Martinsburg  the  procla- 


CIVIL  AND  BORDER  STRIFE  23 

mation  and  the  troops  produced  quiet  by  the  iQth,  but  the 
disorder  spread  west  and  north  to  the  Pennsylvania  lines 
at  Pittsburgh. 

In  Pennsylvania  a  new  administrative  rule  for  double- 
header  trains  requiring  only  one  crew  to  do  the  work  of  two 
aggravated  the  trouble  produced  by  wage  reductions,  and 
Thomas  A.  Scott,  president  of  the  road,  became  the  object 
of  attack.  Governor  Hartranft  ordered  the  rioters  around 
Pittsburgh  to  disperse  on  July  20,  by  proclamation  at 
tested  by  Matthew  S.  Quay,  then  Secretary  of  the  Common 
wealth;  and  on  Saturday  afternoon,  July  21,  General  Brin- 
ton's  Pennsylvania  militia  engaged  the  rioters  in  a  pitched 
battle  as  they  tried  to  clear  the  tracks  in  Pittsburgh.  The 
next  day  was,  indeed,  a  "bloody  Sunday"  in  Pittsburgh, 
with  mayor  and  sheriff  helpless,  the  militia  generally  im 
potent,  and  the  mob  burning  and  shooting.  The  union 
depot  was  destroyed  that  afternoon. 

In  the  next  week  the  wave  of  unrest  spread  to  the  Dela 
ware,  Lackawanna,  and  Western  and  west  to  Chicago.  The 
New  York  Central  was  held  loyal  by  a  judicious  bribe  of 
$100,000  which  William  H.  Vanderbilt,  who  had  just  suc 
ceeded  to  the  control  of  the  great  estate  of  his  father,  the 
"Commodore,"  had  promised  his  men.  In  Chicago,  on 
the  26th,  the  week  ended  in  a  pitched  battle  in  Turner  Hall, 
where  the  police  broke  up  a  meeting  of  alleged  communists 
and  ejected  them  from  their  meeting-place. 

Through  these  eleven  days  the  railroad  riots  advertised 
the  opening  of  a  new  industrial  epoch  and  affected  every 
class  of  society.  Labor  leaders,  while  only  occasionally 
defending  violence,  were  united  in  denouncing  the  use  of 
troops.  A  grand  jury  in  Pittsburgh,  instead  of  hunting  out 
mob  leaders  for  punishment,  tried  to  secure  conviction  of 
the  militia  officers  whose  commands,  bewildered  and  badg 
ered,  had  fired  upon  the  rioters.  It  was  observed  that 
the  militia  were  often  unequal  to  the  tasks  of  riot  duty, 
whereas  federal  proclamations,  supported  by  a  mere  hand 
ful  of  regulars,  produced  order  at  once.  Republican  leaders 
in  general  ceased  for  a  time  their  attacks  upon  Hayes  to 


24     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

castigate  the  South  for  its  weakening  of  the  army.  Con 
servative  citizens,  fearful  that  this  was  only  the  opening 
gust  of  a  social  cyclone,  regretted  the  lack  of  a  stronger 
national  government.  •• 

The  strikers  themselves  went  quietly  back  to  work  after 
their  effort  had  wasted  its  strength  in  blind  explosion.  The 
bottom  of  the  financial  depression  had  been  reached,  and 
hereafter  conditions  generally  improved  for  the  men  at 
work,  while  the  dangerous  army  of  the  unemployed  lessened 
as  new  jobs  drew  oft  its  more  industrious  units.  It  was  a 
squall,  but  not  a  revolution;  the  stability  of  government 
was  affected  not  at  all;  and  the  opponents  on  both  sides 
turned  directly  to  popular  institutions  to  record  their 
claims.  The  operators  appealed  to  legislatures  to  admit  a 
doctrine  of  public  responsibility  for  property  lost  through 
mob  violence;  the  unionists  for  more  favorable  labor  and 
militia  laws.  The  " moral  instinct  of  the  people"  had  been 
the  real  vindicator  of  law  and  order. 

The  railroad  strikes  of  1877  gained  nothing  immediately 

for  the  workers  but  publicity  and  a  keener  feeling  for  the 

identity  of  their  interests.     Their  leaders  moved 

Socialism  . 

on  along  the  course  of  superior  organization,  and 
a  new  order,  the  Knights  of  Labor,  which  had  existed  in 
seclusion  since  1869,  raised  its  head  above  the  surface  as  a 
coordinating  body.  New  immigrants  added  their  influence 
to  what  agitators  described  as  the  war  of  classes,  and  many 
of  them  speedily  rose  to  places  of  leadership  because  the 
workers  of  Europe  had  thought  out  the  problems  of  social 
order  more  penetratingly  than  had  Americans.  Socialism, 
against  which  Germany,  Russia,  and  France  were  raising 
their  weapons,  entered  America  as  an  adjunct  of  the  labor 
movement.  Even  the  Roman  Church,  through  an  encycli 
cal  of  Leo  XIII  in  1878,  attacked  "that  sort  of  men  who, 
under  the  motley  and  all  but  barbarous  terms  and  titles  of 
Socialists,  Communists,  and  Nihilists,  are  spread  abroad 
throughout  the  world  and,  bound  intimately  together  in 
baneful  alliance,  .  .  .  strive  to  carry  out  their  purpose  .  .  . 
of  uprooting  the  foundations  of  civilized  society  at  large." 


CIVIL  AND  BORDER  STRIFE  25 

"It  is  a  good  sign,"  commented  Lyman  Abbott  in  the 
Christian  Union,  "that  the  Church  of  Christ,  both  Protes 
tant  and  Roman,  is  turning  its  attention  to  the  problems  of 
social  and  political  life."  American  society  had  ahead  of  it 
a  long  period  of  education  and  study  before  it  could  under 
stand  the  appeal  of  the  workers  or  readjust  its  government 
to  the  needs  of  modern  life. 

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL  NOTE 

A  clear,  running  view  of  the  problems  of  peace  may  be  found  in  Harper's 
Weekly,  the  Nation,  the  Christian  Union,  and  the  Independent,  all  of  which 
were  conducted  through  these  years  with  intelligence  and  information. 
Helen  Hunt  Jackson,  A  Century  of  Dishonor  (1881),  gives  a  sentimental  and 
sympathetic  view  of  the  Indian  problem,  which  may  be  checked  by  Nel 
son  A.  Miles,  Serving  the  Republic  (1911),  O.  O.  Howard,  Nez  Perce 
Joseph,  An  Account  of  his  Ancestors,  his  Lands,  his  Confederates,  his  Ene 
mies,  his  Murders,  his  War,  his  Pursuit  and  Capture  (1881),  and  F.  L. 
Paxson,  Last  American  Frontier  (1910).  A.  L.  Haydon,  Riders  of  the 
Plains  (1910),  pictures  the  Canadian  Indian  problem.  The  strikes  are 
described  in  detail  in  volume  vin  of  Rhodes,  who  follows  J.  A.  Dacus, 
Annals  of  the  Great  Strikes  in  the  United  States  (1878);  and  there  is  useful 
material  in  John  R.  Commons  (ed.),  Documentary  History  of  American  In 
dustrial  Society  (1910-1 1).  A  literary  sensation  was  created  by  the  anony 
mous  novel  Democracy  (1880),  whose  authorship  was  later  avowed  by 
Henry  Adams  and  his  friends;  The  Bread-Winners  (1883)  was  also  anony 
mous  and  revealed  the  reactions  of  contemporary  society  to  the  labor 
movement.  It  was  later  conceded  to  be  the  work  of  John  Hay. 


CHAPTER  Ilf 

POST-BELLUM  IDEALS 

THE  genuine  spirit  of  America  is  elusive  in  the  black  days 
of  financial  stress  and  moral  discontent  that  extended  from 
the  panic  of  1873  until  after  the  railroad  strikes  of  1877. 
The  historian  turns  in  vain  to  any  single  set  of  actors  to 
reveal  it.  Astor,  Stewart,  and  Vanderbilt,  dying  within 
a  few  months  of  each  other  and  leaving  their  millions  to 
self-conscious  heirs,  are  but  partly  representative  of  their 
contemporaries.  The  statesmen  of  the  day,  bewildered 
by  the  new  ethical  standards  that  arose  to  vex  them,  reveal 
few  elements  of  leadership.  The  universities,  struggling 
to  acclimate  a  new  ideal  within  a  medieval  shell,  did  not 
yet  touch  the  masses  of  the  people;  and  Eastern  men  of 
letters,  whose  leaders  were  about  sung  out,  could  rarely  get 
their  heads  above  the  confusion  of  the  present.  Too  high 
or  too  low,  each  of  these  groups  failed  to  reveal  the  spirit 
of  the  nation  as  it  entered  upon  its  second  century  of  in 
dependence,  but  there  was  a  spirit,  none  the  less,  conscious 
and  clear  of  vision,  and  gathering  up  itself  for  a  new  attack 
on  life.  Its  records  are  in  a  literature  that  emerged  from 
this  period  of  transition,  and  in  none  of  its  figures  was  the 
embodiment  fuller  or  finer  than  in  Samuel  Langhorne  Clem 
ens  (Mark  Twain),  writing  at  leisure  in  his  quaint  octagonal 
study  on  a  knoll  at  Quarry  Farm,  and  putting  on  paper  in 
the  summer  of  1874  the  first  draft  of  Tom  Sawyer  and  Life 
on  the  Mississippi. 

The  pessimism  of  James  Russell  Lowell  and  Edwin  Law 
rence  Godkin  and  their  doubts  as  to  the  success  of  democ- 
Literary  racy  were  inspired  by  their  realization  that  all 
periodicals  America  was  not  like  New  England  and  were 
intensified  by  ideas  from  the  West  and  South  that  looked  to 
them  like  repudiation  and  decay.  The  Atlantic  Monthly, 
founded  in  1857,  had  become,  full-blown,  the  literary  ve- 


POST-BELLUM  IDEALS  27 

hicle  of  New  England  men  of  letters.  There  had  been  I 
nothing  like  it  in  the  past,  and  it  had  no  rival.  Its  stand-  , 
ards  were  those  of  the  best  intelligence  the  United  States 
possessed,  but  its  circulation,  like  that  of  the  New  York 
Nation,  hardly  reached  beyond  the  acquaintances  of  its 
contributors.  Lowell  edited  it  at  first,  then  Fields,  and 
Howells,  and  in  1880  Thomas  Bailey  Aldrich  took  it  in 
hand.  Less  literary,  but  more  lively,  its  rival,  Harper's 
Monthly,  shared  with  it  in  the  later  seventies  the  leadership 
in  American  letters.  The  field  was  enlarged  when  in  1881 
the  old  Scribner's  Monthly  became  the  Century  Magazine 
under  the  editorship  of  Dr.  J.  G.  Holland,  and  then  of 
Richard  Watson  Gilder  and  Robert  Underwood  Johnson, 
whose  inspiration  sustained  the  new  periodical  for  forty 
years.  Scribner's  itself  was  revived  in  1886  to  complete  the 
quartette. 

The  broadening  of  public  taste,  revealed  by  the  literary 
periodicals  that  it  supported,  called  soon  for  literary  gossip 
as  well  as  literature.  The  Dial  was  founded  in  Chicago  in 
1880,  to  purvey  this  gossip.  The  Critic  began  a  year  later 
with  its  office  close  to  the  centers  of  literary  information  in 
the  East.  The  Book-Buyer,  revived  in  1884,  was  some 
thing  more  than  a  trade  journal,  and  catered  to  the  same 
new  interest,  while  in  due  time  Current  Literature  (1888)  and 
the  Bookman  (1895)  broadened  and  intensified  the  field. 

American  literature  in  the  century  just  ended  wras  lim 
ited  in  its  appeal  and  its  accomplishment,  but  "the  only 
position  that  has  ever  been  acknowledged  cheerfully  by  the 
American  people,"  as  some  one  wrote  in  the  Atlantic  in  1881, 
''has  been  the  small  circle  of  first-class  historians,  poets, 
and  scientists,  Prescott,  Motley,  Ticknor,  Agassiz,  Bryant, 
Longfellow.  ..."  The  spirit  of  democracy  tended  to  rec 
ognize  an  intellectual  aristocracy  even  if  it  refrained  from 
reading  all  its  works,  but  the  aristocracy  was  now  one  of 
old  men  with  a  gap  in  years  between  them  and  the  oncom 
ing  generation. 

The  contrast  between  the  old  and  the  new  in  letters  was 
so  sharp  at  times  as  to  be  embarrassing.  A  dinner  given 


28      RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

to  Whittier  on  his  seventieth  birthday  in  1877  by  the 
Whittier  Atlantic  Monthly  brought  together  the  literary 
dinner  family  of  that  periodical  in  the  service  of  com 

radeship  and  letters.  On  this  occasion  the  venerable  Ralph 
Waldo  Emerson  was  there,  and  the  dean  of  American  poets. 
Henry  Wadsworth  Longfellow,  as  well  as  the  sprightly  Oli 
ver  Wendell  Holmes.  James  Russell  Lowell  would  prob 
ably  have  been  present  had  not  Hayes  sent  him  to  Madrid  as 
Minister  in  accordance  with  the  American  tradition  that 
diplomacy  is  one  of  the  functions  of  men  of  letters.  The 
speeches  at  the  banquet  were  full  of  reminiscence  over  the 
glories  of  the  past,  until  a  false  note  uttered  by  Mark  Twain 
brought  dismay  to  both  diners  and  speaker. 

With  the  modesty  that  was  always  mingled  with  his 
naive  and  pleasant  vanities,  Clemens  felt  that  his  invita- 
Mark  tion  to  the  Whittier  banquet  marked  his  recog- 

Twam  nition  by  the  East.  He  prepared  with  great 

pains  and  long  premeditation  a  speech  in  which  he  placed 
himself  in  a  miner's  cabin  in  the  Sierras  and  introduced  the 
words  of  Holmes  as  well  as  those  of  Emerson  and  Longfellow 
into  the  mouths  of  uncouth  mountain  vagabonds.  In  his 
later  years  he  republished  the  address,  reverting  to  his 
earlier  belief  that  it  was  both  humorous  and  appropriate, 
but  when  he  delivered  it  in  Boston  on  December  17,  1877,  it 
was  received  with  a  silence  growing  colder  and  more  deadly 
every  minute,  as  his  audience  resented  what  seemed  to  be 
deliberate  insult  to  the  dignity  and  good  taste  of  its  leaders. 
He  went  home  in  dismay  that  was  lightened  only  by  the 
fact  that  the  immediate  victims  of  his  ill-timed  humor 
either  failed  to  hear  it  or  were  themselves  more  generous 
than  their  associates.  To  the  end  of  his  life  he  never  knew 
the  difference  between  humor  that  was  in  good  taste  and 
humor  that  was  unprintable,  and  only  the  scrupulous  edit 
ing  of  his  wife  saved  him  from  himself. 

Mark  Twain  was  in  1877  just  on  the  verge  of  recognition 
from  America,  with  the  Adventures  of  Tom  Sawyer  (1876) 
as  his  newest  work,  and  with  an  English  success  that  con 
vinced  New  England  of  his  importance.  There  is  no  truer 


POST-BELLUM  IDEALS  29 

description  of  the  great  plains  and  mining  camps  in  the  last 
decade  before  the  advent  of  the  railroad  than  he  wrote  in 
Roughing  It  (1872).  His  travels  carried  him  to  Europe, 
while  European  adventures  were  still  novel,  and  The  Inno 
cents  Abroad  (1869)  and  A  Tramp  Abroad  (1880)  brought 
him  an  expanding  circle  of  readers  who  knew  they  liked  him, 
but  were  not  sure  that  he  was  literature.  The  vital  humor 
of  Jim  Smiley  and  his  Jumping  Frog  (1865)  continued  to 
inspire  his  later  writings,  as  well  as  his  lectures  on  the 
lyceum  circuit.  Like  the  writers  of  the  older  generation, 
he  told  his  story  to  audiences  over  all  the  country,  and  in 
1872  he  followed  Artemus  Ward  to  London,  where  his  suc 
cess  was  instant.  New  England  was  slow  to  admit  him 
within  its  dignified  circle.  "The  literary  theories  we  ac 
cepted  were  New  England  theories,"  wrote  Howells,  who 
sat  at  an  Atlantic  desk  after  1866;  "the  criticism  we  valued 
was  New  England  criticism,  or,  more  strictly  speaking, 
Boston  theories,  Boston  criticism." 

Whittier  and  his  contemporaries  had  done  their  work, 
but  it  was  not  until  the  middle  of  the  following  decade  / 
that  America  recognized  their  successors.      By    The  new 
the  time  E.  C.  Stedman  wrote  his  "Twilight  of    writers 
the  Poets"  (1885)  f°r  the  Century,  new  names  had  risen  to 
the  head  of  the  American  list,  while  the  public  was  finding 
enjoyment  in  a  wider  range  of  letters.      The  first  fifteen 
names  on  a  list  of  immortals  compiled  by  the  Critic  and 
Good  Literature  in  1884  included  only  four  of  the  older  group : 
Holmes,  Lowell,  Whittier,  and  the  historian  Bancroft,  who 
was  now  in  his  old  age  revising  his  monumental  History  of 
the  United  States  and  admitting  to  his  intimacy  the  young 
men  who  were  to  be  leaders  in  Washington  letters  in  the 
next  generation:  Hay,  Henry  Adams,  Clarence  King,  and 
Lodge. 

The  remaining  names  of  the  first  fifteen  were  Howells, 
Curtis,  Aldrich,  Harte,  Stedman,  White,  Hale,  Cable, 
James,  Clemens,  and  Warner. 

The  men  whose  writings  have  since  been  accepted  as  the 
most  expressive  of  the  American  character  were  recognized 


30     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

by  their  contemporaries  as  their  work  appeared.  Henry 
James,  with  The  American  (1876),  stepped  at  once  into 
leadership  as  an  exponent  "of  contemporary  American  life 
in  fiction,"  and  held  the  position  undl  his  death.  William 
Dean  Howells,  who  stood  above  him  on  the  Critic's  list  of 
1884,  was  gaining  power  as  he  used  it  in  The  Lady  of  the 
Aroostook  (1879)  and  A  Modern  Instance  (1882),  until  his 
Rise  of  Silas  Lapham  (1885)  became  perhaps  the  most  dis 
tinctive  portrait  of  Eastern  society  in  the  decade.  Clemens 
was  accepted  without  question  as  the  years  advanced.  Tom 
Sawyer  was  followed  by  its  companion  tale,  The  Adven 
tures  of  Huckleberry  Finn  (1885),  which  the  Athenceum  subse 
quently  described  as  "one  of  the  six  greatest  books  ever 
written  in  America."  His  powers  were  steadily  broaden 
ing,  and  The  Prince  and  the  Pauper  (1881)  and  The  Personal 
Recollections  of  Joan  of  Arc  (1895)  revealed  him  in  his 
broader  sympathies,  after  he  had  outgrown  the  role  of  the 
professional  humorist. 

The  themes  of  the  American  men  of  letters  ran  to  por- 
X  traiture  and  local  color.  "There  is  nothing  definite  in 
Transition  American  society  for  the  dramatist  to  get  hold 
in  literature  Q^ ' »  said  a  writer  in  the  A  tlantic  in  1 88 1 ,  who  had 
in  mind  the  social  uniformity  dominant  in  the  old  American 
society.  The  lack  of  caste  as  a  motive  in  fiction  was  filled 
in  part  by  the  appearance  of  the  American  girl  as  a  novel 
species,  untrammeled  by  social  limitations  and  breezy  with 
the  expansiveness  of  the  open  country.  Howells  and  Henry 
James  used  her  with  freedom,  and  the  illustrators  made  out 
of  her  a  definite  literary  type.  The  amazing  popularity  of 
General  Lew  Wallace's  Ben  Hur  (1880)  and  F.  Marion 
Crawford's  Mr.  Isaacs  (1882)  revealed  the  catholic  tastes 
of  a  widening  reading  public. 

The  sharp  change  in  the  course  of  literary  production 
was  nowhere  clearer  than  in  literature  for  children.  The 
moral  tracts  of  the  mid-century  and  the  sensational  ro 
mances  which  Ned  Buntline  manufactured  and  Nick  Carter 
continued  were  gradually  displaced  by  literature  of  a  dif 
ferent  stripe.  Howard  Pyle  brought  out  The  Merry  Ad- 


POST-BELLUM  IDEALS  31 

ventures  of  Robin  Hood  (1883),  popularizing  a  folk-lore  and 
setting  a  new  standard  with  his  own  illustrations.  Frances 
Hodgson  Burnett's  Little  Lord  Fauntleroy  (1886)  added  a 
new  child  to  the  personages  of  fiction.  St.  Nicholas  (1873) 
and  Harper's  Young  People  (1879)  began  to  produce  much 
of  the  new  children's  literature  in  periodical  form,  and  were 
accepted  in  England  nearly  as  freely  as  at  home. 

A  search  for  local  color  carried  Mark  Twain  to  the  west 
ern  fringe  of  civilization,  where  Bret  Harte  found  treasures 
of  a  similar 'character,  and  where  Helen  Hunt    "Ethiopio- 
Jackson  found  the  materials  for  Ramona  (1884).    mania" 
The  South  was  rediscovered  at  the  same  time  and  an  "  ethio- 
piomania"   ran  its  course  through  the  early  eighties,  as 
negro  songs  and  music  had  their  day.     The  cult  expressed 
itself  sometimes  in  doggerel: 

"  Piano  put  away 

In  de  garret  for  to  stay; 
De  banjo  am  de  music  dat  de  gals  am  crazed  about. 

De  songs  dat  now  dey  choose 

Am  'spired  by  de  colored  muse, 
An'  de  ole  kind  o'  poeckry  am  all  played  out." 

Sometimes  it  was  revealed  in  the  popularity  of  negro  play 
ers  and  of  white  actors  masquerading  as  such.  Haverly's 
Mastodon  Minstrels,  with  forty  men  in  the  cast,  held  the 
stage  at  Drury  Lane  in  London  in  1884,  forty  years  after 
the  first  minstrel  troupes  had  made  their  appearance,  and 
serious  students  of  negro  lore  took  the  trouble  to  debate 
in  public  whether  the  banjo  was  or  was  not  the  negro's  in 
strument. 

Joel  Chandler  Harris  brought  the  negroes  into  letters 
on  a  higher  plane  when  he  collected  their  folk-lore  in  Uncle 
Remus,  His  Songs  and  Sayings  (1880).  His  popularity 
was  shared  by  George  W.  Cable,  whose  Grandissimes  (1880) 
portrayed  the  Creole  life  in  old  New  Orleans.  Cable  soon 
had  the  descendants  of  the  Creoles  buzzing  around  his  ears, 
but  the  portrait  seemed  true  to  life  to  the  rest  of  the 
country,  and  readings  by  the  author  were  welcome  every 
where.  Judge  Albion  W.  Tourgee's  A  Fool's  Errand  (1880) 


32     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

gave  a  less  benevolent  view  of  Southern  life  than  Harris  and 
Cable  did,  and  was  used  as  a  campaign  document  against 
the  mild  treatment  of  the  South  begun  by  President  Hayes. 

America  continued  to  be  entertained  by  dialect  litera 
ture  such  as  Lowell  had  exploited  long  since  in  the  Biglow 
Dialect  Papers,  and  by  professional  humorists  like  Pe- 

hterature  troleuni  V.  Nasby  and  Artemus  Ward.  James 
Whitcomb  Riley  stopped  painting  signs  in  Logansport  and 
gave  up  his  travels  with  a  patent  medicine  troupe,  and 
brought  out  in  1884  The  Old  Swimmiri1  Hole,  and  Seven 
More  Poems.  He  soon  began  a  long  career  upon  the  plat 
form  reading  his  dialect  verse.  In  1886  he  traveled  in 
company  with  Edgar  Wilson  (Bill)  Nye,  founder  of  the 
Laramie  Boomerang  (1881),  and  one  of  the  most  successful 
humorists. 

The  taste  of  the  eighties  was  the  product  of  the  common 
schools  inspired  somewhat  by  the  literary  reputations  of 
Provincial-  New  England  and  led  here  and  there  by  grad 
uates  of  the  aspiring  new  colleges.  It  made  up 
in  avidity  what  it  lacked  in  discrimination  and  standards. 
When  Richardson  built  Trinity  Church  in  Boston  for  the 
congregation  of  Phillips  Brooks,  his  adaptation  of  the  roman- 
esque  was  imitated  west  to  the  Pacific.  There  was  still 
enough  provincialism  for  the  United  States  to  be  keenly 
sensitive  to  what  Europe  thought  about  it.  James  Bryce 
since  the  early  seventies  had  been  a  repeated  and  welcome 
visitor  as  he  gathered  his  materials  for  the  American  Com 
monwealth  (1888).  Thomas  Huxley  found  ready  audiences 
as  he  discussed  "  The  Evidences  of  Evolution  "  on  his  Ameri 
can  trip  of  1876.  Herbert  Spencer,  whose  Principles  of 
Sociology  (1876)  invented  the  science  of  that  name,  was 
welcomed  in  1882.  Matthew  Arnold,  in  1883,  found  "the 
blaring  publicity"  of  New  York  beyond  his  expectations, 
but  was  grateful  for  "the  kindness  and  good -will  of  every 
body."  The  English  historian  Edward  A.  Freeman  wrote 
Some  Impressions  of  the  United  States  (1883),  after  a  lectur 
ing  trip  in  1 88 1.  He  spoke  at  Lowell  Institute  in  Boston,  a 
century  after  the  surrender  at  Yorktown,  upon  the  English 


POST-BELLUM  IDEALS  33 

people  in  their  three  homes:  Germany,  Britain,  and  America; 
and  gained  wide  notoriety  a  little  later  through  his  sugges 
tion  that  ''this  would  be  a  grand  land  if  every  Irishman 
would  kill  a  negro,  and  be  hanged  for  it.  American  curi 
osity  was  wide  open,  and  there  was  a  welcome  even  for 
Oscar  Wilde,  who  lectured  in  1882  on  the  English  renascence 
in  "a  fine  aesthetic  jargon  .  .  .  knee  breeches,  pumps,  a 
white  waistcoat,  and  white  silk  stockings." 

The  self-consciousness  that  led  the  United  States  to  be  in 
terested  in  what  others  thought  of  it  evoked  a  new  curiosity 
as  to  the  meaning  of  American  history.  The  Historical 
Centennial  Exposition  in  Philadelphia  in  1876  writin^ 
was  part  of  a  series  of  patriotic  centennials  that  continued 
until,  in  1889,  the  one-hundredth  anniversary  of  the  inaugu 
ration  of  Washington  was  celebrated.  The  early  years  of 
this  period  brought  out  a  flood  of  oratory  on  the  Revolution, 
and  Bancroft  revised  his  History  of  the  United  States  in  a  cen 
tennial  edition.  Interest  was  turned  to  other  aspects  of 
American  history.  In  one  field  Francis  Parkman  was  bring 
ing  to  a  conclusion  his  studies  on  the  French  in  America 
and  their  struggle  with  the  English  in  the  eighteenth  cen 
tury.  Henry  Adams,  lifting  history  to  a  new  level  of  in 
struction  at  Harvard  in  the  seventies  and  studying  the  lives 
of  Albert  Gallatin  and  John  Randolph,  settled  down  in  the 
eighties  to  his  nine-volume  History  of  the  United  States 
during  the  Administrations  of  Jefferson  and  Madison  (1889- 
91).  In  1883  the  first  two  volumes  of  the  History  of  the 
People  of  the  United  States  appeared.  The  author,  John 
Bach  McM aster,  an  obscure  instructor  in  engineering  at 
Princeton  College,  became  immediately  the  holder  at  the 
University  of  Pennsylvania  of  one  of  the  earliest  chairs  in 
American  history  to  be  created,  and  started  in  the  United 
States  a  school  of  historians  who  saw  the  realities  of  history 
in  the  whole  life  of  the  people  rather  than  in  the  doings  of 
kings  and  courts.  In  the  autumn  of  1884  a  group  of  stu-  | 
dents  interested  in  the  historical  revival,  led  by  Herbert  B. 
Adams,  of  Johns  Hopkins  University,  and  Andrew  D.  White, 
organized  the  American  Historical  Association.  The  next 


34     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

year  a  Cleveland  business  man,  James  Ford  Rhodes,  who 
had  already  made  himself  financially  independent,  turned 
his  affairs  over  to  his  brother-in-law,  Marcus  A.  Hanna,  and 
set  out  to  write  the  story  of  the  Civil  War  under  the  title 
A  History  of  the  United  States  Since  the  Compromise  0/1850. 
The  frontier  of  history  was  pushed  down  through  the 
nineteenth  century  under  the  new  impulse.  Its  quality  rose 
from  the  level  of  antiquarianism  and  the  defense  of  democ 
racy,  that  inspired  most  of  the  writings  before  the  Civil 
War,  and  bore  the  impress  of  the  higher  scholarship  of  the 
graduate  seminary  at  Johns  Hopkins  and  the  superior  teach 
ing  elsewhere.  A  treatise  on  Congressional  Government 
(1885),  by  Woodrow  Wilson,  one  of  the  Johns  Hopkins 
students,  received  immediate  recognition.  Another  of  the 
group  carried  the  standards  of  scholarship  into  the  West. 
Frederick  Jackson  Turner  produced  in  Wisconsin  in  1893 
his  essay  on  the  Significance  of  the  Frontier  in  American 
History  with  such  compelling  logic  as  to  force  a  complete 
restatement  of  the  facts  in  American  history  in  the  next 
quarter-century. 

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL  NOTE 

The  works  cited  above  in  the  text  constitute  the  best  bibliography  for 
this  chapter.  M.  A.  De  Wolfe  Howe,  The  Atlantic  Monthly  and  Its  Makers 
(1918),  throws  light  on  the  Atlantic  group.  Sara  Norton  and  M.  A. 
De  Wolfe  Howe,  Letters  of  Charles  Eliot  Norton  (1913),  and  Norton's  Let 
ters  of  James  Russell  Lowell  (1894),  are  also  of  great  value.  Gustav  Pollak, 
Fifty  Years  of  American  Idealism  (1915),  traces  the  story  of  the  New  York 
Nation.  George  Haven  Putnam,  Memories  of  a  Publisher  (1915),  and  J.  H. 
Harper,  The  House  of  Harper;  A  Century  of  Publishing  in  Franklin  Square 
(1912),  are  useful  special  works.  Henry  Watterson,  M  arse  Henry  (1919), 
is  the  autobiography  of  the  most  picturesque  and  the  last  survivor  of  the 
great  journalists  of  the  seventies.  Albert  Bigelow  Paine,  Life  of  Mark 
Twain  (1912),  has  few  equals  in  American  biography.  Compare  also 
Julia  C.  Harris,  Life  and  Letters  of  Joel  Chandler  Harris  (1918). 


CHAPTER  IV 
SPECIE  PAYMENTS,  1879 

"MARK  TWAIN  inflicted  indigestion  on  Boston,"  said  the 
Chicago  Inter-Ocean,  in  comment  upon  his  speech  at  the 
Whittier  dinner,  ' '  and  the  silver  dollar  has  driven    silver  and 
New  York  to  almost  hopeless  lunacy."     The  in-    sreenbacks 
vasion  of  the  West  in  the  fields  of  letters  and  history  was 
paralleled  by  an  eruption  of  border  problems  that  demanded 
adjustment   from   the   party   leaders.      Among   these   the 
emergence  of  a  silver  issue  attracted  the  attention  of  Con 
gress  in  1877  and  1878. 

The  American  silver  dollar  was  in  truth  the  "dollar  of  our 
daddies"  in  1878.  It  had  rarely  been  seen  in  circulation 
since  Jackson's  act  in  1834  established  its  relative  weight,  or 
coinage  ratio,  at  sixteen  to  one  with  gold.  The  original  at 
tempt  of  Hamilton  in  his  financial  report  of  1791  to  establish 
a  bimetallic  money,  in  which  two  metallic  coins  should  cir 
culate  at  the  same  value,  was  frustrated  by  the  inability 
of  the  two  metals  selected,  gold  and  silver,  to  maintain  an 
unchanging  commercial  ratio  with  each  other.  Hamilton 
provided  for  their  coinage  at  the  ratio  of  fifteen  to  one,  at 
which  weights  the  gold  dollar  was  a  few  cents  more  valuable 
than  the  silver  dollar,  and  was  speedily  withdrawn  from  cir 
culation/  The  ancient  Gresham  law,  to  the  effect  that  bad 
money  drives  out  good,  or,  otherwise  stated,  that  when  two 
moneys  are  in  existence  with  the  same  nominal  value,  but 
with  different  intrinsic  value,  the  more  valuable  will  be 
hoarded,  and  the  less  valuable  will  remain  in  circulation  and 
fix  the  value  of  the  coin,  was  fully  borne  out  by  the  experi 
ence  of  the  United  States  under  both  Hamilton's  law  and 
Jackson's. 

The  change  of  coinage  ratio  to  sixteen  to  one  in  1834  was 
designed  to  bring  it  closer  to  the  commercial  ratio  in  order 
to  keep  both  metals  in  simultaneous  circulation.  The 


36     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

result  was  merely  to  change  the  inequality.  The  silver 
dollar  now  became  more  valuable  than  its  gold  associate, 
and  disappeared  from  use.  Subsidiary  coins  of  the  value 
of  fifty  cents  or  less  were  deliberately* made  light  weight  in 
1853,  but  being  issued  only  as  they  were  bought  at  par  from 
the  Treasury  did  not  displace  the  gold  in  circulation.  The 
American  half-dollar  was  a  favorite  coin  thereafter,  because 
of  the  unreliability  of  bank-notes  and  the  inconvenience  of 
handling  small  gold  coins,  but  it  was  possible  to  grow  to 
manhood  before  the  Civil  War  without  ever  seeing  a  silver 
dollar  of  American  coinage. 

The  Gresham  law,  which  haJ  driven  gold  out  of  circula 
tion  before  1834  and  silver  after  that  date,  disposed  of  both 
metals  early  in  the  Civil  War.  The  issuance  of  greenbacks 
by  the  United  States  was  perhaps  a  necessary  measure  to 
enlarge  the  currency  to  meet  the  war  demands  upon  it,  but 
the  legal-tender  quality  given  to  the  greenbacks,  which 
forced  the  creditor  to  accept  them  when  offered  to  him  by 
his  debtor,  resulted  in  both  a  rise  of  prices  and  a  premium 
upon  gold.  The  gold  dollar  passed  out  of  circulation  in  a 
few  days,  the  cheaper  subsidiary  silver  passed  out  a  little 
later,  and  the  currency  of  the  United  States  went  upon  a 
paper  basis  with  small  notes  or  "shin-plasters,"  postage 
stamps,  and  private  tokens  serving  as  small  change.  It 
was  still  upon  this  paper  basis  when  Hayes  was  inaugu 
rated  and  pledged  himself  to  restore  the  financial  credit  of 
the  United  States. 

In  February,  1873,  when  no  coins  had  been  in  circulation 
for  a  dozen  years,  and  few  silver  dollars  for  nearly  forty, 
Decline  in  Congress  revised  its  coinage  laws,  and  the  silver 
silver  dollar,  although  not  losing  its  legal  standing,  was 

dropped  from  the  list  of  coins  to  be  manufactured  freely  at 
the  mint  upon  the  presentation  of  bullion.  The  price  of 
silver  was  still  above  $1.2929  per  ounce,  at  which  commer 
cial  rate  the  gold  and  silver  dollars  would  have  been  equal 
in  value.  In  later  years  Senator  Stewart  of  Nevada  per 
suaded  himself  that  the  law  "was  conceived  for  the  sole 
purpose  of  clandestinely  omitting  the  silver  dollar  from  the 


SPECIE  PAYMENTS,  1879  37 

list  of  coins,"  and  Henry  Demarest  Lloyd,  writing  editorials 
for  the  Chicago  Tribune,  came  to  believe  that  it  was  "done 
secretly  and  stealthily  to  the  profound  ignorance  of  those 
who  voted  for  it,  and  of  the  President  who  approved  it." 
The  act,  however,  had  been  pending  in  Congress  for  several 
sessions,  with  its  content  clear  to  any  one  who  chose  to  read, 
and  would  never  have  been  denounced  as  the  "  crime  of 
1873  "  if  the  price  of  silver  had  not  declined  sharply  in  that 
year,  changing  thereby  the  relative  value  of  the  two  dollars 
and  bringing  loss  to  every  one  interested  in  the  production  of 
silver. 

The  decline  in  the  value  of  silver  beginning  about  1873 
was  due  to  the  same  complex  of  causes  that  decreased  the 
price  of  nearly  all  commodities  in  the  last  third  of  the  nine 
teenth  century.  The  extension  of  railroads  into  the  Westi 
made  it  easier  to  reach  the  silver  mines.  The  output  of  thej 
Comstock  lode  in  Nevada,  which  had  been  laboriously 
hauled  to  San  Francisco  under  guard,  was  able  to  get  to 
market  by  rail  after  1 869.  New  discoveries  in  chemistry  and 
metallurgy  and  better  practice  in  mining  engineering  came 
from  the  European  laboratories  and  the  American  schools  of 
technology.  They  tended  to  reduce  the  cost  of  extracting  sil 
ver  from  the  ore  and  brought  into  easy  commercial  use  low 
grade  and  refractory  ores  hitherto  of  little  value.  The  price 
of  silver  fell  from  normal  forces  affecting  its  cost  of  produc 
tion.  The  fall  was  hastened  by  a  lessening  necessity  for  its 
use  in  commerce.  Bank-checks  and  clearing-houses  made 
it  possible  to  transact  much  business  without  a  physical 
transfer  of  money,  while  gold  was  less  bulky  and  more  con 
venient  than  silver  for  the  settlement  of  large  accounts. 

The  decline  in  the  value  of  silver  was  further  accelerated 
by  the  discovery  and  development  of  new  deposits.     Dur 
ing  the  Civil  War  there  was  a  succession  of  min-    Mining 
ing  booms  that  dotted  the  inland  empire  with    booms  and 
transient  camps,  some  of  which  became  the  foun 
dations  for  the  new  Territories  of  Colorado,  Nevada,  Arizona, 
Idaho,  and  Montana.     Nevada  was  admitted  to  the  Union 
in  1864  and  Colorado  followed  twelve  years  later.    In  1868, 


38      RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  -STATES 

as  a  consequence  of  the  mining  booms,  Congress  was  able  to 
complete  the  territorial  subdivision  of  the  United  States  by 
the  organization  of  Wyoming,  leaving  only  one  line  still  to  be 
drawn  upon  the  map  of  the  United  States,  the  boundary 
between  North  and  South  Dakota. 

Dakota  Territory,  created  in  1861  and  reshaped  in  the 
next  few  years,  was  conceived  as  an  agricultural  community, 
with  a  farming  population  in  its  southeast  corner.  I  ts  wheat 
lands  in  the  valley  of  the  Red  River  of  the  North  were  as 
yet  only  a  promise,  since  there  was  no  railroad  to  take  the 
wheat  to  its  market.  The  western  half  of  Dakota  was  an 
Indian  country  in  which  in  1868  the  Sioux  Indians  were  as 
signed  a  permanent  home.  In  the  Black  Hills  at  the  heart  of 
the  Sioux  reserve,  in  the  southwest  corner  of  the  Territory, 
gold  and  silver  were  found  in  1875,  and  in  1876  an  army  of 
prospectors  overran  the  reservation.  From  Bismarck  on 
the  upper  Missouri,  where  a  railroad  had  arrived  in  1873, 
and  from  Fort  Pierre  and  Yankton,  farther  down  the  river, 
the  miners  followed  routes  to  the  Black  Hills  published  by  the 
War  Department.  An  Indian  outbreak  and  the  massacre 
of  Custer's  men  on  the  Little  Big  Horn  was  a  consequence  of 
the  attrition  between  the  races.  The  boundaries  of  the  re 
serve  were  rearranged,  and  the  towns  of  Dead  wood,  Custer, 
and  Rapid  City  became  the  centers  of  an  active  mining  com 
munity  in  1877.  The  stage-coaches  to  Deadwood  attracted 
much  of  the  romantic  interest  that  had  gathered  around  the 
overland  stages  to  California  two  decades  earlier,  and  the 
flood  of  precious  metal  was  swollen  by  the  output  of  the 
mines.  A  bill  to  establish  a  Territory  of  Lincoln  in  the  Black 
Hills  region,  with  lands  cut  away  from  Dakota,  Montana, 
and  W7yoming,  was  recommended  for  passage  in  the  Sen 
ate  in  1878.  The  bonanza  wheat  farms  of  the  Red  River 
Valley  aroused  the  simultaneous  discussion  of  a  Territory 
of  Pembina. 

New  mines  were  discovered  in  Colorado  to  increase  still 
further  the  production  of  silver.  While  the  Atchison, 
Topeka,  and  Santa  Fe  was  contesting  with  the  Denver  and 
Rio  Grande  the  right  to  the  exclusive  use  of  the  Royal  Gorge 


SPECIE  PAYMENTS,  1879  39 

for  a  railroad  extending  up  the  Arkansas  River  above 
Pueblo,  new  deposits  were  uncovered  near  the  headwaters 
of  that  stream,  and  Leadville  began  to  ship  both  ore  and 
bullion  to  the  world.  By  1878  there  was  a  population  of 
20,000  in  the  new  silver  camp,  upsetting  the  political  balance 
of  Colorado  and  stimulating  the  demand  for  legislation  to 
avert  the  consequences  of  the  falling  price  of  silver. 

The  silver  dollar  had  been  dropped  from  the  coinage  list 
only  a  few  months  when  a  demand  appeared  in  the  Westerni 
States  to  put  it  back  and  restore  the  free  coinage  of  silver^ 
at  the  old  ratio.  In  all  of  the  mining  States  the  demand  was 
repeated,  and  men  who,  like  Senator  Stewart,  had  supported 
the  Act  of  1873  discovered  now  that  it  had  been  a  crime. 
Bills  to  restore  free  silver  were  added  to  the  group  of  financial 
measures  looking  toward  the  resumption  of  specie  payments 
and  the  refunding  of  the  Civil  War  debt,  and  were  pressed 
insistently  upon  Congress.  At  the  commercial  rate  existing 
at  the  end  of  1877,  it  was  possible  to  buy  enough  silver  for  a 
silver  dollar  for  about  ninety-three  cents,  and  the  words 
"  honest  money"  and  "sound  money"  had  come  to  be  used 
by  persons  who  believed  that  the  free  coinage  of  silver 
dollars  would  bring  Gresham's  law  into  operation,  and  bring 
a  cheap  dollar  into  circulation,  with  the  resulting  loss  to 
every  one  who  was  forced  to  receive  it.  "  There  seems  to  be 
a  general  agreement  among  monied  classes  that  its  [the  free 
silver  bill's]  intent  is  dishonest,"  said  the  Commercial  and 
Financial  Chronicle.  A  newspaper  poet  in  Norwich  wrote: 

"Now,  Messrs.  Congressmen,  be  just, 

Throw  off  the  veil  of  thin  pretense; 
Stamp  on  the  lie  —  '  In  God  we  trust 
For  the  remaining  seven  cents."' 

Richard  Parks  Bland,  a  Missouri  Congressman,  whose 
experience  embraced  that  of  the  depressed  South,  the  debtor 
frontier,  and  the  silver  mining  districts,  carried  a 


bill  for  the  resumption  of  free  silver  coinage  at    Allison 
the  old  ratio  through  the  House  of  Representa 
tives  in  1877.     The  majority  of  the  House  was  Democratic, 
but  the  vote  was  bi-partisan,  as  it    was   in   the  Senate, 


40     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

where  the  majority  was  Republican.  In  the  upper  house 
Senator  Allison  of  Iowa  procured  the  adoption  of  an  amend 
ment  limiting  the  character  of  the  bill.  As  the  Bland- 
Allison  Act  finally  passed,  it  directed  the  Secretary  of  the 
Treasury  to  buy  each  month  from  two  million  dollars'  worth 
to  four  million  dollars'  worth  of  silver  and  to  coin  it  into 
standard  silver  dollars  which  should  have  the  quality  of  legal 
tender. 

The  Bland-Allison  Act  ran  counter  to  the  financial  policy 
of  President  Hayes  and  Secretary  Sherman,  who  believed 
that  it  contained  the  elements  of  repudiation,  since  it  was  a 
deliberate  action  to  lower  the  value  of  the  standard  dollar. 
Hayes  adhered  to  his  pledge  to  uphold  the  financial  credit 
of  the  nation.  He  vetoed  the  law,  but  Congress  passed  it 
over  his  veto,  February  28,  1878,  by  a  sweeping  bi-partisan 
majority.  The  influence  of  the  silver  States  was  behind  the 
law  as  a  measure  of  protection,  and  was  reenforced  by  the 
conscious  desire  of  the  debtor  West  and  South  for  more  and 
cheaper  money. 

The  legal-tender  greenbacks  of  the  Civil  War  constituted 
the  basis  of  American  currency  at  the  close  of  the  struggle 
and  became  the  emblem  of  a  movement  that  affected  both 
great  parties  for  twenty  years  after  1865.  At  the  close  of 
the  Civil  \Var  the  greenbacks  were  far  below  par,  the  pre 
mium  on  gold  standing  at  150  on  the  day  of  Lee's  surrender, 
and  the  greenback  dollar  worth  accordingly  only  sixty-' 
seven  cents  in  gold.  The  greenbacks  issued  by  the  Govern 
ment  at  par  had  constituted  a  forced  loan  to  the  extent  of 
nearly  four  hundred  and  fifty  million  dollars,  and  as  they  de 
preciated  in  value  they  worked  a  confiscation  of  property 
against  every  holder  in  whose  hands  their  value  declined. 
As  the  Treasury  undertook  to  redeem  the  public  faith  and 
get  rid  of  the  greenbacks,  their  value  rose.  By  June,  1868, 
they  were  worth  seventy-one  cents  on  the  dollar.  Their 
rise  impressed  upon  every  person  who  was  in  debt  the  fact 
that  the  real  value  of  his  debt  was  increased  to  that  extent. 
The  whole  South  was  depressed  \vith  the  debt  and  bank 
ruptcy  that  the  Civil  War  produced  and  Reconstruction  in- 


SPECIE  PAYMENTS,  1879  41 

creased.  The  Northwestern  States  were  equally  in  debt, 
due  to  their  speculative  investments  in  reclaiming  a  new 
frontier  and  increasing  the  improvements  on  their  old  prop 
erly.  A  demand  that  the  redemption  of  the  greenbacks  be 
discontinued  originated  in  the  Northwest  and  was  known 
as  the  "Ohio  idea."  Congress  yielded  to  the  pressure  and 
forbade  further  withdrawals  of  the  greenbacks  in  1868,  while 
the  Democratic  Party  in  its  national  convention  of  that 
year  adopted  substantially  a  greenback  plank. 

Throughout  the  two  administrations  of  General  Grant 
greenback  movement  was  strongly  supported  by  poli- 
fans  in  both  parties,  and  the  panic  of  1873,  Resump- 
rith  the  lean  financial  years  that  followed  it,  tlon  Act 
filled  the  ranks  of  the  discontented.  An  inflation  bill^for 
increasing  the  volume  of  greenbacks  in  circulation  passed 
both  houses  of  Congress  in  1874,  but  was  blocked  by  Grant's^ 
veto.  The  next  year  John  Sherman,  Senator  from  Ohio 
and  chairman  of  the  Committee  on  Finance,  was  the  fa 
ther  of  a  bill  for  the  resumption  of  specie  payments,  which 
became  a  law  January  14,  1875.  The  date  set  for  resump 
tion  was  January  i,  1879,  and  meanwhile  the  Secretary  of 
the  Treasury  was  directed  to  accumulate  a  fund  of  gold  to 
make  resumption  possible.  The  financial  doctors  disagreed 
as  to  the  size  of  the  fund  necessary,  but  the  Secretary  was 
given  power  to  accumulate  the  necessary  amount  by  bor 
rowing  or  otherwise.  The  promise  of  resumption  improved 
the  credit  of  the  United  States  and  raised  the  value  of  the 
greenbacks  in  consequence  so  that  they  were  worth  eighty- 
nine  cents  in  January,  1875,  and  ninety-six  cents  two  years 
later,  when  Hayes  became  President  in  1877  and  appointed 
Senator  Sherman  Secretary  of  the  Treasury. 

The  increasing  certainty  that  resumption  was  likely  to 
be  accomplished  led  the  Greenbackers  to  more  aggressive 
action.     They  demanded  that  the  redemption  of    Greenback 
the  greenbacks  be  stopped,  and  that  all  the  bonds    Party 
of  the  Civil  War  that  were  described  in  the  legislation  as 
"payable  in  lawful  money  of  the  United  States"  should 
be  redeemed  in  an.  additional  issue  of  greenbacks,  which 


42      RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

would  have  the  double  advantage  of  increasing  the  green 
backs  in  circulation  and  so  helping  the  debtor,  and  of  get 
ting  rid  of  the  public  debt  without  raising  by  taxation  the 
funds  to  satisfy  it.  The  Greenback  National  Party  placed 
a  ticket  in  the  field  in  1876,  headed  by  Peter  Cooper  and 
General  Sam  F.  Carey,  and  pledged  to  "financial  reform 
and  industrial  emancipation."  "To  this  work  —  to  help 
ing  care  for  the  Rag  Baby,  as  the  gold  gamblers  sneeringly 
term  the  child  of  war  and  the  saviour  of  the  country,  till  it 
reaches  Washington  and  drives  the  money-changers  from 
the  Temple  of  Liberty,  we  pledge  the  support  of  this  pa] 
wrote  the  editor  of  Pomeroy's  Democrat,  one  of  the 
lance  journals  supporting  the  new  third  party. 

fhe  strikes  of  1877  brought  new  hopes  to  the  leaders  of 
the  Greenback  Party,  who  glimpsed  a  chance  to  unite  the 
discontented  elements  of  labor  to  the  discontented  farmers, 
and  to  produce  as  a  result  an  agrarian-industrial  party  of 
reform,  to  fight  the  "bloated,  moneyed  aristocracy."  The 
Greenback  vote  in  1876  was  unimportant,  but  here  and 
there  in  Maine,  Pennsylvania,  and  Wisconsin  local  contro 
versies  made  it  possible  for  the  Greenback  Party  to  control 
the  balance  of  power  in  1877.  Peter  Cooper  and  Wendell 
Phillips  joined  in  the  call  for  a  national  convention  to  be 
held  at  Toledo  February  22,  1878,  to  blend  the  two  move 
ments  into  a  new  party  for  which  they  chose  the  name 
"National."  "Financial  theories  are  as  plenty  as  black 
berries  among  delegates,  and  nearly  every  man  has  a  pet 
scheme  for  the  salvation  of  the  country,"  wrote  the  Cin 
cinnati  Commercial  of  the  convention.  The  delegates  were 
described  as  "the  rattle-brained  publicists  at  Toledo"  by 
the  New  York  Tribune,  which  went  on  to  say  that  "the  gush 
of  woman  suffragists,  the  drivel  of  prairie  financiers,  and 
the  rant  of  working-men's  demagogues  all  tend  to  promote 
a  spirit  of  pessimism  on  this  side  of  the  Atlantic."  Edito 
rials  on  the  coming  party,  inspired  by  a  remembrance  of  the 
commune  at  Paris  and  the  strikes  of  1877,  called  it  "com 
munism";  but  in  the  elections  of  1878  the  aggregate  of  dis 
contented  votes  for  Greenback  candidates  in  the  several 


SPECIE  PAYMENTS,  1879  43 

States  ran  beyond  a  million,  and  General  Benjamin  F. 
Butler,  of  Massachusetts,  always  politically  on  the  make, 
avowed  a  willingness  to  become  the  standard-bearer  of  the 
new  National  Labor-Greenback  Party. 

While  the  sections  and  classes  were  struggling  with  the 
panaceas  for  reform,  President  Hayes  was  confronting  the 
difficulty  of  doing  business  with  an  unsympa-  Election 
thetic  Congress.  His  first  steps  in  organizing  frauds 
his  government  alienated  the  leaders  of  his  own  party, 
while  the  House  of  Representatives  was  controlled  by  the 
,ocrats  with  Samuel  J.  Randall,  of  Pennsylvania,  as 
ker.  The  Democratic  claim  that  Hayes  was  President 
y  fraud  was  made  more  credible  by  the  admissions  of 
members  of  his  own  party.  William  E.  Chandler,  a  mem 
ber  of  the  Republican  National  Committee,  openly  at 
tacked  the  title  of  Hayes  in  a  public  letter  to  New  Hamp 
shire  Republicans  in  December,  1877.  The  following  May, 
Clarkson  N.  Potter,  of  New  York,  became  chairman  of  a 
House  committed  that  investigated  the  alleged  frauds.  The 
Democratic  hopes  that  the  investigation  would  uncover 
reasons  for  voiding  the  election  and  unseating  Hayes  were 
lessened  as  facts  were  accumulated  by  the  Potter  com 
mittee,  and  the  Matthews  committee  that  the  Senate 
created  simultaneously.  The  Western  Union  Telegraph 
Company  was  forced  to  submit  its  file  of  messages  for  ex 
amination,  with  the  result  that  cipher  dispatches  were  dis 
covered,  sent  from  Tilden's  own  house  to  Southern  Demo 
crats.  These  dispatches  were  deciphered  by  the  New  York 
Tribune  and  revealed  an  attempt  on  the  part  of  some  one 
to  buy  enough  Hayes  electors  to  seat  Tilden.  The  charge 
of  fraud  became  a  boomerang  against  the  Democrats,  and 
Hayes,  by  his  steadiness  under  attack  and  his  adherence  to 
his  campaign  pledges,  gained  increasing  respect  from  the 
country  at  large. 

The  forces  of  discontent  that  gave  birth  to  the  National 
Party  supported  the  silver  miners'  movement  for  free  silver, 
which  would  have  the  same  tendency  as  the  greenbacks  to 
increase  the  volume  of  money  and  lower  its  value.  The 


44     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

overwhelming  majorities  by  which  the  Bland-Allison  Act 
became  a  law  showed  the  wide  distribution  of  the  forces  of 
inflation,  but  had  no  effect  upon  a  President  who  was  al 
ready  used  to  working  without  t\\e  approval  of  either  his 
own  party  leaders  or  the  opposition.  Secretary  Sherman 
continued  to  assemble  his  gold  reserve  to  cover  the  redemp 
tion  of  the  greenbacks.  The  international  conference  on 
silver  made  mandatory  by  the  Bland-Allison  Act  was  held 
in  Paris  in  August,  1878,  and  was  entirely  fruitless.  The 
advances  of  the  American  delegation  in  favor  of  an  inter- 
national  agreement  upon  a  bimetallic  ratio  were  received 


with  courtesy,  but  without  result.     Europe  was  too 
nitely  pledged  to  the  gold  standard  to  be  affected  by  Amerl 
can  pressure  to  the  contrary. 

The  price  of  greenbacks  and  the  credit  of  the  United 
States  continued  to  rise  with  the  preparations  for  re- 
Resump-  sumption.  In  December,  1878,  the  greenbacks 
tion  reached  par,  and  throughout  the  country  there 

were  evidences  of  universal  prosperity  instead  of  the  calam 
ity  that  the  Greenbackers  had  foretold.  On  January  2, 
1879,  the  New  York  sub-treasury  began  to  exchange  gold 
for  greenbacks  on  demand,  with  a  reserve  of  $133,508,000 
in  coin  to  control  the  $346,681,016  outstanding  greenbacks. 
Resumption  came  without  a  shock,  and  the  first  day's  ex 
perience  indicated  the  correctness  of  Horace  Greeley's  view 
that  "the  way  to  resume  is  to  resume."  Instead  of  a  long 
line  of  greenback-holders  anxious  for  the  redemption  of  their 
paper,  holders  of  gold  brought  their  metal  in  to  exchange  it 
for  greenbacks.  No  one  wanted  gold  when  he  was  sure  he 
could  get  it,  nor  was  he  willing  to  exchange  any  money  of 
the  United  States  for  less  than  par.  When  Secretary  Sher 
man  wrote  his  annual  report  in  November,  1879,  after  ten 
months  of  resumption,  he  had  redeemed  only  $11,256,000 
in  notes,  but  had  increased  the  coin  reserve  in  the  Treas 
ury  to  $225,000,000. 


SPECIE  PAYMENTS,  1879  45 


BIBLIOGRAPHICAL  NOTE 

Murray  S.  Wildman,  Money  Inflation  in  the  United  States  (1905),  gives 
an  excellent  analysis  of  the  chronic  tendency  of  the  frontier  toward  infla 
tion.  Wesley  C.  Mitchell,  History  of  the  Greenbacks  (1903),  is  the  best  book 
on  its  subject,  while  Davis  R.  Dewey,  Financial  History  of  the  United 
States,  is  in  its  numerous  editions  an  almost  ideal  textbook  on  that  subject 
Fred  E.  Haynes,  James  Bird  Weaver  (1919),  gives  a  picture  of  the  green 
back  movement  in  the  Middle  West,  which  may  be  supplemented  some 
what  by  the  thin  compilation,  WT.  Byars  (ed.),  Richard  Parks  Bland  (1900). 
The  papers  of  Ignatius  Donnelly  are  in  the  Minnesota  State  Historical 
Society,  while  those  of  L.  H.  (Calamity)  Weller  are  in  the  Wisconsin  State 
Historical  Society.  Ellis  P.  Oberholtzer,  Jay  Cooke,  the  Financier  of  the 
Civil  War  (1907),  provides  an  admirable  background  for  this  period  of 
financial  history. 


CHAPTERS 
THE  COLLAPSE  OF  THE  STALWARTS,  l88o 

THE  independent  members  of  the  Republican  Party  ex 
erted  a  continuous  influence  after  1872,  and  by  their  threat 
Republican  to  repeat  the  secession  of  that  year  brought  pres- 
factions  sure  to  bear  Up0n  the  professional  rulers  of  trn 
party.  The  widespread  corruption  in  national  and  local 
administrations,  revealed  or  suggested  by  the  exploits  of 
Tweed,  the  gold  conspiracy  of  Gould  and  Fisk,  the  Credit 
Mobilier  scandal,  the  whiskey  ring,  and  the  salary  grab, 
kept  them  resolved  to  struggle  against  the  election  of  spoils 
men  to  national  office.  In  the  spring  of  1876  the  meeting 
of  the  independents  at  the  Fifth  Avenue  Hotel  was  a 
warning  to  the  Republican  Convention  to  be  careful  in  its 
nomination.  The  selection  of  Hayes  was  acceptable  to 
them,  and  his  pledges  to  reform  the  national  administra 
tion  followed  by  his  appointment  of  Carl  Schurz  as  Sec 
retary  of  the  Interior  found  favor  in  the  independent 
group. 

The  main  body  of  the  Republicans  were  "Stalwart" 
or  "Half-Breed,"  according  to  their  preference  for  leaders. 
Senator  Roscoe  Conkling  was  the  most  prominent  of  the 
Stalwart  leaders,  and  included  among  his  political  intimates 
most  of  the  men  who  had  been  identified  with  the  two 
administrations  of  Grant.  The  Half-Breed  faction  com 
monly  avowed  an  interest  in  reform  as  opposed  to  the  open 
cynicism  of  many  of  the  Stalwarts.  James  G.  Elaine,  their 
most  prominent  leader,  and  John  Sherman  were  less  identi 
fied  with  machine  politics  and  more  with  the  substance  of 
government  than  most  of  the  Stalwarts.  Both  groups 
were  offensive  to  the  independents,  and  both  found  reasons 
for  an  aversion  to  the  political  policies  of  Hayes,  as  the 
latter  undertook  to  fulfill  his  pledge  for  good  government. 

The  anger  of  the  party  leaders  at  the  structure  of  the 


THE  COLLAPSE  OF  THE  STALWARTS,  1880       47 

Cabinet  was  intensified  by  an  executive  order  issued  in 
June,  1877,  forbidding  office-holders  to  take  office- 
active  share  in  party  management.  A  bill  to  holders  in 
hinder  the  collection  of  assessments  upon  office 
holders  had  been  passed  the  summer  before,  but  the  new 
order  struck  at  the  best  recognized  fact  in  party  organi 
zation.  "The  decision  is  undoubtedly  the  forerunner  of 
the  most  important  new  departure  in  modern  politics," 
said  the  Chicago  Tribune.  Public  officials  everywhere  held 
party  offices  as  national  committeemen  or  as  members 
of  the  party  organization  in  the  States.  The  political  ex 
istence  of  many  of  these  was  tied  up  with  the  advantage 
they  enjoyed  from  their  dual  capacity,  and  the  summer 
conventions  were  watched  for  evidence  as  to  the  effective 
ness  of  the  reform.  "He  will  need  the  zealous  support  of 
all  good  men  of  both  parties,"  said  the  New  York  Herald. 
In  New  York,  Alonzo  Cornell,  chairman  of  the  State  Re 
publican  Committee,  defied  the  order,  and  continued  to 
hold  on  to  his  office  as  naval  officer  of  the  port  of  New  York. 
In  Wisconsin  Colonel  E.  W.  Keyes  treated  it  with  more 
respect  and  abdicated  his  State  chairmanship  rather  than 
be  displaced  from  the  post-office  at  Madison. 

Public  attention  was  directed  to  the  New  York  Custom 
House  by  the  insubordination  of  Cornell,  and  the  knowl 
edge  that  he  and  Chester  A.  Arthur,  collector  of  Arthur  and 
the  port,  were  Stalwarts  who  stood  high  in  the  Cornel1 
councils  of  Senator  Conkling.  The  Treasury  Department, 
under  whose  administrative  jurisdiction  they  fell,  was  in 
process  of  investigation  by  direction  of  Sherman,  and  was 
reported  to  be  a  nest  of  political  appointees  more  interested 
in  serving  Stalwart  policies  than  in  earning  the  salaries  they 
received.  It  was  rumored  that  the  President  had  deter 
mined  to  displace  both  officials,  and  Senator  Conkling  hur 
ried  home  from  a  European  trip  to  dominate  the  New  York 
Convention,  and  to  fight  the  President.  In  December  "we 
saw  to  it  that  the  President's  plan  was  foiled,"  said  Thomas 
C.  Platt,  chief  assistant  of  Conkling.  The  Senate  refused 
to  confirm  the  nominations  of  Theodore  Roosevelt  and 


48     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

L.  B.  Prince  as  successors  to  Arthur  and  Cornell,  and  the 
Stalwart  officials  continued  at  their  posts  until  the  close  of 
the  session  in  1878,  when  Hayes  summarily  suspended  them 
from  office.  Conkling  denounced  -the  suspension  in  fury 
as  party  treachery,  but  the  Senate  finally  permitted  the 
removal  of  the  officers. 

The  breach  between  Hayes  and  the  Stalwarts  was  widened 
by  the  political  martyrdom  of  Arthur  and  Cornell,  but  the 
independent  Republicans  were  not  drawn  any  closer  to  the 
President.  In  the  Interior  Department  and  the  Treasury 
vSchurz  and  Sherman  were  encouraged  to  make  their  ap 
pointments  on  the  basis  of  merit,  but  the  President  found 
appointive  offices  for  Florida  and  Louisiana  Republicans 
whose  jobs  had  been  lost  when  he  withdrew  the  troops  from 
the  South,  and  he  temporarily  closed  the  breach  in  the 
party  by  sending  Half-Breed  members  of  his  Cabinet  to 
help  the  Conkling  forces  in  the  New  York  campaign  of  1878. 
"We  shall  not  have  a  political  millennium  until  the  people 
want  it"  was  the  comment  of  Leslie  s  in  1877.  The  inde 
pendents  resented  the  President's  inability  to  divorce  him 
self  completely  from  politics,  and  the  personal  isolation  of 
Hayes  continued  to  the  end  of  his  administration. 

In  September,  1879,  General  Ulysses  S.  Grant  landed  at 
San  Francisco  from  his  voyage  around  the  world.  His 
Return  of  arrival  followed  a  long  series  of  stories  of  state 
Grant  receptions  accorded  him  wherever  he  had  gone. 

He  was  received  not  only  with  the  honors  of  royalty  due  to 
an  ex- President,  but  as  the  greatest  soldier  of  his  day.  As 
he  traveled  east  across  the  States,  with  public  banquets 
and  civic  receptions  at  every  stop,  his  popularity,  tarnished 
when  he  left  the  White  House,  resumed  its  fullest  luster. 
His  former  comrades  in  arms  felt  their  political  power  for  the 
first  time  seriously.  The  prolonged  Democratic  filibusters 
against  paying  the  army  and  the  enforcement  of  the  law  by 
federal  troops  increased  the  public's  distrust  of  politicians 
and  its  regard  for  Grant.  He  formally  completed  his  trip 
by  a  visit  to  Philadelphia  on  December  16,  where  he  was 
entertained  at  the  great  celebration  at  the  Union  League 


THE  COLLAPSE  OF  THE  STALWARTS,  1880       49 

under  the  direction  of  Senator  Don  Cameron,  his  former 
Secretary  of  War;  and  the  next  day  Cameron,  with  the  fame 
of  Grant  at  its  height,  took  up  the  reorganization  of  the  Re 
publican  National  Committee  in  order  to  make  the  renom- 
ination  of  Grant  possible  in  1880.  "The  reasons  urged  for 
the  renomination  of  General  Grant,"  said  Harper's  Weekly, 
"  are  typified  in  a  picture  of  a  man  on  horseback  withstand 
ing  a  host  of  anarchists." 

The  Republican  National  Committee,  when  it  met  in 
Washington  December  17,  1879,  was  without  a  head,  since 
Zachary  Chandler,  its  former  chairman,  had  recently  died. 
The  friends  of  Grant  took  advantage  of  the  vacant  Pennsyl 
vania  seat  on  the  committee  to  bring  in  Cameron.  William 
H.  Kemble,  the  Pennsylvania  member  whom  he  replaced, 
the  reputed  author  of  the  spoilsman's  phrase,  "  addition, 
division,  and  silence,"  was  under  indictment  for  bribery, 
growing  out  of  the  Pittsburgh  riots  of  1877.  Cameron  was 
elected  chairman  of  the  committee  at  once,  and  with  the 
support  of  Conkling  and  Logan  laid  the  plans  to  control  the 
Chicago  Convention  in  the  following  June. 

There  was  no  thought  of  the  renomination  of  Hayes  to 
succeed  himself.  He  had  disclaimed  a  second  term  before 
starting  on  his  first,  and  had  not  been  under 


pressure  to  reconsider  his  determination  ;  nor  did    tions  of 
he  give  active  support  to  any  other  aspirant  for 
the  nomination.     Elaine  and  Sherman  were  both  brought 
forward  by  their  friends,  Sherman  believing  that  the  nomina 
tion  was  a  fitting  reward  for  his  financial  services,  and  Elaine 
stirring  up  the  antipathies  aroused  against  him  in   1876 
when  his  similar  aspirations  had  been  impeded  by  scandals 
connected  with  his  career  as  Speaker  of  the  House  of  Repre 
sentatives. 

In  the  Chicago  Convention  Grant  could  have  been  nom 
inated  if  it  had  been  possible  for  the  Stalwart  leaders  to  hold  L 
each  State  delegation  to  the  unit  rule.     They  contended  * 
that  the  majority  of  a  delegation  from  any  State  had  the 
right  to  determine  the  vote  of  the  whole  delegation  as  a  unit. 
This  claim  was  beaten  on  the  floor  of  the  convention  after  a 


5o     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

persuasive  speech  against  it  by  General  James  A.  Garfield, 
Congressman  and  Senator -elect  from  Ohio,  and  floor  man 
ager  for  Sherman.  With  the  unit  rule  beaten,  Grant's 
"  old  guard"  of  306  faithful  delegates  clung  together  in  vain 
Neither  Sherman  nor  Elaine  could  command  a  majority  of 
the  convention,  and  after  a  long  deadlock  Garfield  was 
nominated  for  the  presidency  on  the  thirty-sixth  ballot 

Having  nominated  Garfield,  a  Half  Breed,  the  conven  \ 
tion  made  overtures  lor  party  unity  by  nominating  Chester  I 
A.  Arthur  as  Vice-President.  Gold  win  Smith  thought  that 
the  victory  of  Garfield  represented  "the  purer  and  better 
part  of  the  republican  party,"  but  the  proceedings  of  the 
convention  indicate  that  the  majority  was  inspired  chiefly 
by  the  desire  to  win.  ''We  are  not  here,  sir,"  said  Flana 
gan,  of  Texas,  whom  the  Chicago  Tribune  described  as 
possessing  "a  truthful  and  ingenuous  mind,"  "We  are 
not  here,  sir,  for  the  purposes  of  providing  offices  for  the 
democracy.  .  .  .  After  we  have  won  the  race,  as  we  will, 
we  will  give  those  who  are  entitled  to  positions  office. 
What  are  we  up  here  for?" 

A  week  after  the  Republican  Convention  the  Greenback 
Party  nominated  James  B.  Weaver,  of  Iowa,  for  the  presi 
dency.  The  Chicago  Tribune  reporter,  impressed  perhaps 
by  his  recollection  of  Barnum's  Greatest  Show  on  Earth  that 
had  exhibited  the  preceding  week  on  the  lake  front,  called  it 
a  "side-show,  and  a  funny  one.  ...  It  was  an  idiotic  trin 
ity,  composed  of  Fiatists,  Labor-Union  Greenbackers,  and 
foreign  Communists,  with  Free-Lovers,  Woman-Suffragists, 
and  fanatics  of  every  description."  The  Greenback  Con 
vention  at  least  knew  what  it  wanted,  which  was  more  than 
could  be  said  of  the  Democratic  Party,  which  was  still  with 
out  a  recognized  leader  except  Tilden,  who  lay  under  the 
suspicion  aroused  by  the  cipher  dispatches.  At  Cincinnati 
later  in  the  month,  the  Democrats  selected  General  Win- 
field  Scott  Hancock,  "the  Democratic  Trojan  horse,"  for 
their  candidate ;  otherwise  cynically  described  by  the  New 
York  Sun  as  "a  good  man,  weighing  two  hundred  and  fifty 
pounds." 


THE  COLLAPSE  OF  THE  STALWARTS,  1880       51 

There  was  no  clear  issue  separating  the  two  major  parties, 
and  the  nomination  of  each  ticket  was  determined  chiefly 
by  party  availability.  In  General  Hancock  the  Election  of 
Democratic  Party  sought  to  evade  the  Republi-  Garfield 
can  charge  of  continued  disloyalty,  and  to  enjoy  the  advan 
tages  accruing  from  the  nomination  of  a  military  hero.  The 
canvass  was  one  of  orthodox  oratory  and  party  intrigue.  To 
ward  the  end  of  October  a  letter  was  forged  in  the  interests 
of  the  Democratic  candidate  and  printed  in  the  New  York 
Truth.  It  purported  to  have  been  written  by  Garfield  to  a 
manufacturer  named  Morey  favoring  the  employment  of 
cheap  Chinese  labor  throughout  the  West.  It  was  widely 
used  in  spite  of  Garfield's  denial  of  the  fraud.  The  chair 
man  of  the  Democratic  National  Committee  affirmed  its  au 
thenticity  for  a  time  "Look  out  for  Roorbacks"  was  the 
warning  of  the  New  York  Tribune,  cautioning  the  party  to 
be  on  its  guard  against  further  fresh  lies.  The  Maine  elec 
tions  coming"  in  September  stimulated  more  vigorous  or 
ganization  by  the  Republican  Party  in  behalf  of  Garfield. 
Secretary  Dorsey,  of  the  Republican  National  Committee, 
went  in  person  to  Indiana  to  take  charge  of  the  State  elec 
tion  there  on  October  12,  and  the  swinging  of  this  doubtful 
State  into  line  was  regarded  as  the  political  master-stroke 
of  the  campaign.  His  Republican  friends  attended  a 
famous  banquet  given  him  at  Delmonico's  a  little  later, 
where  Grant  was  toastmaster  and  leaders  of  the  party 
gave  countenance  to  his  methods  and  success.  The  speech 
of  Arthur,  openly  alluding  to  corruption  in  the  election, 
was  greeted  with  approving  laughter  by  the  banqueters. 

The  difficult  task  of  Garfield  during  the  canvass,  to  keep 
in  line  the  Conkling  faction  without  losing  the  support  of 
Elaine  and  his  friends,  was  made  more  difficult  after  his 
election,  when  it  was  necessary  for  him  to  organize  a  Cabinet 
to  please  all  tastes.  Bl^ine  became  his  Secretary  of  State 
and  was  his  chief  adviser.  Overtures  were  made  to  the  in 
dependents  by  the  appointment  of  one  of  their  number, 
Wayne  MacVeagh,  of  Philadelphia,  as  Attorney-General. 
An  old  supporter  of  Conkling,  Postmaster  Thomas  L. 


52      RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

James,  of  New  York,  was  promoted  to  be  Postmaster- 
General.  The  aversion  of  the  Greenbackers  in  the  West 
to  the  financial  methods  of  New  York  was  recognized  by 
the  appointment  of  William  L.  Wifidom,  of  Minnesota,  as 
Secretary  of  the  Treasury.  The  apparent  harmony  for 
which  Garfield  struggled  lasted  only  until  he  ventured 
to  send  into  the  Senate  his  first  personal  nominations  for 
ifices  in  the  State  of  New  York,  and  precipitated  a  strug 
gle  with  the  Senators  from  that  State  over  his  right  to 
control  this  patronage. 

"Did  you  notice  the  nominations  sent  in  yesterday? 
7 hey  mean  business  and  strength,"  wrote  Mrs.  James  G. 
Patronage  Blaine,  March  24,  1881,  commenting  upon  the 
and  the  nomination  by  President  Garfield  of  a  new  col 
lector  of  the  port  for  New  York.  Until  this  date 
Garfield  steered  a  middle  course  between  the  factions,  and 
the  Stalwart  Senators  persuaded  themselves  that  he  would 
not  interfere  with  their  local  control  of  patronage.  The  in 
fluence  of  Blaine  in  the  Cabinet,  however,  as  its  only  strong 
and  seasoned  political  member,  was  growing  every  day.  His 
long  letters  of  advice  to  the  President  often  contained  sound 
counsel,  but  when  the  President  chose  to  assert  his  power 
over  offices  at  the  center  of  Conkling's  political  domain,  he 
invited  certain  opposition.  Conkling  opposed  the  confirma 
tion  of  the  nomination  at  once,  invoking  senatorial  courtesy 
on  the  ground  that  he  had  not  been  consulted  in  advance, 
while  Garfield  invited  attention  to  the  issue  by  withdrawing 
from  the  Senate  other  pending  nominations  in  order  to  give 
prominence  to  this  particular  appointment.  He  said  to 
John  Hay,  to  whom  he  had  offered  the  post  of  private 
secretary,  "They  may  take  him  out  of  the  Senate  head  first 
or  feet  first;  /  will  never  withdraw  him."  For  nearly  two 
months  Conkling  and  Platt  successfully  postponed  the  con 
firmation,  but  in  May  the  Senate  yielded  to  a  growing  pres 
sure  of  public  opinion  that  upheld  the  fundamental  con-v 
tention  of  Garfield  that  the  power  of  appointment  belongs' 
to  the  President  and  not  to  the  Senator  of  any  State. 

On  May  14  Conkling  resigned  his  seat  in  the  Senate  in 


THE  COLLAPSE  OF  THE  STALWARTS,  1880       53 

protest  against  this  impairment  of  his  senatorial  preroga 
tive,  and  hurried  to  Albany,  where  the  New  York  Legisla 
ture  was  in  session,  hoping  to  be  vindicated  in  his  position 
and  triumphantly  reflected.  The  junior  Senator,  Thomas 
C.  Platt,  resigned  as  well,  earning  thereby  the  nickname, 
"  Me  too,"  that  clung  to  him  for  two  decades,  until  he  came 
to  be  known  as  the  "Easy  Boss."  Vice-President  Arthur 
went  to  Albany  to  assist  in  lobbying  for  his  old  associate, 
but  the  "quixotic  quest  of  vindication"  by  the  "Stalwart 
Jupiter"  and  his  "little  satellite"  came  to  nothing.  The 
New  York  Legislature  was  unmoved  by  the  injured  esteem 
of  its  Senators  and  reflected  neither  of  them.  Platt  with 
drew  for  a  period  into  private  business;  Conkling  passed 
forever  out  of  national  politics,  leaving  behind  him  noth 
ing  that  lasted  except  his  cynical  declaration  that  "when 
Doctor  Johnson  said  that  patriotism  was  the  last  refuge 
of  a  scoundrel,  he  ignored  the  enormous  possibilities  of  the 
word  'reform.' ' 

The  new  Administration,  righting  for  its  political  life  as 
that  of  Hayes  had  done,  was  at  least  not  hampered  by  or 
ganized  opposition  in  Congress.  Here  the  Re-  Murder  of 
publican  .Party  expected  to  be  able  to  command  Garfield 
majorities  in  both  houses  when  they  should  convene  in 
December,  1881.  Before  that  date  arrived  the  whole  as 
pect  of  the  political  situation  was  changed  by  the  murderous 
attack  made  upon  the  President  on  July  2.  Garfield  was 
at  the  time  on  his  way  to  a  college  reunion  at  Williamstown, 
Massachusetts.  The  murderer,  Guiteau,  shot  him  as  he 
passed  through  the  railway  station  to  the  train,  and  then 
ran  noisily  into  the  arms  of  a  waiting  policeman,  who  asked 
him  why  he  had  committed  the  act.  His  answer  was,  "  I  am 
a  Stalwart,  and  want  Arthur  for  President."  The  later  in 
vestigations  that  were  made  showed  that  Guiteau  was  prob 
ably  a  madman,  and  that  he  had  earlier  in  the  spring  infested 
the  White  House  seeking  a  job,  which  had  been  refused. 
His  language  that  suggested  a  Stalwart  plot  had  no  founda 
tion  in  the  acts  of  any  but  himself,  but  the  mere  fact  that 
the  life  of  a  President  lay  at  the  mercy  of  an  office-seeker, 


54     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

and  that  even  a  lunatic  could  justify  murder  on  political 
grounds,  served  to  advertise  the  futility  of  the  struggle  of 
the  factions  and  the  demoralizing  nature  of  the  fight  for 
patronage.  • 

Garfield  lingered  through  the  summer,  reported  as  dying 
one  day  and  as  recovering  the  next,  and  the  Government 
Chester  A.  in  Washington  was  forced  to  dwell  upon  the 
Arthur  meaning  of  the  phrase  "total  disability  of  the 

President"  as  contained  in  the  Constitution.  The  recess 
of  Congress  prevented  any  attempt  at  legislative  action  to 
interpret  it.  On  September  19  Garfield  died  and  Chester  A. 
Arthur,  who  had  first  come  into  national  prominence  when 
Hayes  attacked  him  as  a  spoilsman,  took  up  the  work  of 
President  of  the  United  States.  Within  the  next  few  weeks 
most  of  the  members  of  Garfield 's  Cabinet  were  allowed  to 
resign  and  were  replaced  by  Secretaries  more  congenial  to 
the  new  President.  Only  one  of  the  resigning  statesmen 
left  a  perceptible  gap.  Elaine  had  brought  force  and 
personality  into  the  State  Department,  and  had  seen  the 
possibility  of  turning  American  foreign  policy  into  an  af 
firmative  program.  He  carried  on  with  vigor  the  contro 
versy  that  Evarts  started  under  Hayes  with  reference  to 
the  Clayton-Bulwer  Treaty  and  American  rights  on  the 
Isthmus  of  Panama.  He  revived  the  note  of  American 
cooperation  that  Simon  Bolivar  touched  in  1825,  and 
issued  invitations  for  a  Pan-American  Congress  to  meet  in 
Washington.  He  intervened  in  the  war  in  South  America 
and  he  brought  foreign  affairs  into  domestic  politics  by  the 
anti-British  tenor  of  his  correspondence,  which  gained  him 
wide  popularity  with  the  Irish  vote.  He  retired  into  pri 
vate  life  in  December,  1881,  residing  in  Washington  and 
devoting  himself  to  the  composition  of  his  Twenty  Years  of 
Congress.  The  successor  of  Blaine,  Frelinghuysen,  contin 
ued  the  policies  as  started  except  that  the  invitations  for 
the  Pan-American  Congress  were  withdrawn. 

The  reorganization  of  the  Cabinet,  instead  of  being  the 
first  step  toward  a  clean  sweep  of  Half-Breeds  out  of  office, 
was  substantially  the  last  step  taken.  To  the  amazement 


THE  COLLAPSE  OF  THE  STALWARTS,  1880       55 

of  his  former  associates  "Chet"  Arthur  was  unwilling  to 
proscribe  the  faction  of  Garfield.  He  never  gained  the  re 
gard  of  the  Half-Breed  group,  nor  the  support  of  the  in 
dependents,  but  he  succeeded  in  turning  against  himself  the 
opposition  of  the  group  that  had  followed  Conkling.  In 
his  personal  conduct  he  changed  from  the  manners  of  a 
custom-house  politician  to  those  of  one  of  the  most  dignified 
Presidents  of  the  United  States.  Before  the  end  of  his 
administration,  decay  had  weakened  the  powers  of  the  Stal 
wart  ring,  and  issues  connected  with  new  problems  in 
American  life  had  begun  to  remould  the  character  of  the 
Republican  Party. 

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL  NOTE 

Edward  Stanwood,  History  of  the  Presidency  (1898),  is  always  the  easiest 
and  best  reference  for  the  platforms  of  national  parties  and  the  details  of 
presidential  campaigns.  Professor  Theodore  Clark  Smith  is  engaged  in  the 
preparation  of  a  needed  life  of  Garfield.  James  G.  Blaine,  Twenty  Years 
of  Congress  (1884),  covers  the  period  preceding  his  appointment  as  Secre 
tary  of  State.  His  official  biography  written  after  his  death  is  Mary 
Abigail  Dodge  (Gail  Hamilton),  Biography  of  James  G.  Blaine  (1895). 
Edward  Stanwood,  his  brother-in-law,  also  has  a  James  Gillespie  Blaine 
(1905).  The  Recollections  of  John  Sherman  give  one  a  version  of  the  con 
vention  of  1880.  A.  B.  Conkling,  Life  and  Letters  of  Roscoe  Conkling 
(1889),  is  an  unimportant  biography.  Campaign  methods  may  be  fol 
lowed  in  Testimony  Before  the  Wallace  Select  Committee  of  the  Senate  on 
Election  Frauds,  46th  Cong.,  2d  Sess.,  Sen.  Rep.  427. 


CHAPTER  VI 
THE  NATIONAL  TRANSPORTATION  PLANT 

NATIONAL  politics  lost  much  of  its  hold  on  the  people  in 
the  administrations  of  Hayes  and  Garfield,  in  which  poli- 
Era  of  ticians  seemed  to  be  squabbling  for  factional 

prosperity  advantage  and  the  spoils,  and  in  which  few  of 
the  recognized  leaders  had  any  program  to  offer  for  the 
better  adjustment  of  government  to  the  facts  of  life.  More 
interesting  in  all  respects  were  the  facts  of  life  themselves, 
as  the  depression  prevailing  for  fiye__y_ears  after  1873  was 
replaced  by  normal  conditions,  and  these  in  turn  by  in 
creasing  prosperity  that  burst  into  an  era  of  lavish  specu 
lation  while  Arthur  was  President.  Robert  Ingersoll, 
perhaps  the  greatest  orator  of  his  day,  spoke  better  than 
he  knew  when  he  declared  in  the  Republican  Convention 
of  1876  "that  prosperity  and  resumption,  when  they  come, 
must  come  together;  that  when  they  come,  they  will  come 
hand  in  hand  through  the  golden  harvest  fields;  hand  in 
hand  by  the  whirling  spindles  and  the  turning  wheels;  hand 
in  hand  by  the  open  furnace  doors;  hand  in  hand  by  the 
flaming  forges;  hand  in  hand  by  the  chimneys  filled  with 
eager  fire,  greeted  and  grasped  by  the  countless  sons  of  toil." 
Underneath  the  prosperity  that  prevailed  in  the  decade 
of  the  eighties  was  confidence  in  the  stability  and  credit  of 
the  Government.  Resumption  placed  all  money  on  a  parity 
and  destroyed  the  uncertainties  that  came  with  fluctuating 
currency.  The  supply  of  labor  was  recruited  by  increasing 
hordes  of  immigrants  from  Europe.  Continuous  falling 
prices  made  the  dollar  of  the  wage-earner  go  farther  than 
expected  every  day.  Economic  leadership  at  the  top  was 
founded  upon  the  completion  of  a  transportation  plant 
national  in  its  extent  and  upon  mechanical  invention  that 
enlarged  the  list  of  human  wants  and  increased  the  ease  of 
satisfying  them. 


THE  NATIONAL  TRANSPORTATION  PLANT       57 

Most  of  the  railroads  of  the  United  States  in  1879  had 
been  built  in  the  preceding  forty  years  and  all  of  them  had 
commonly  been  operated  as  private  business  on  a  Disappear- 
competitive  basis.  One  by  one  the  regions  of  the  ance  of 
United  States  were  relieved  from  the  limitations 
upon  free  communication  established  by  the  mountain 
ranges  and  the  direction  of  river  flow.  The  railroads  cut 
across  all  obstacles  and  introduced  new  competitions  with 
the  older  highways  of  trade.  Before  the  Civil  War,  with 
thirty  thousand  miles  of  track  in  operation,  the  East  and 
the  old  Northwest  were  well  supplied  with  railroads,  and 
the  South  was  partially  provided.  In  the  decade  of  the 
sixties  the  greatest  railway  changes  were  north  and  west 
of  Chicago,  and  on  the  border  of  the  Western  plains,  where 
the  Union  Pacific  Railway  was  driven  to  the  Pacific.  The 
opening  of  this  road  in  1869  marks  the  beginning  of  the 
final  chapter  in  the  building  of  the  railroad  plant.  The 
Eastern  States  were  still  separated  from  the  Pacific  slope 
by  the  great  barrier  of  plains,  mountains,  and  desert,  but  in 
the  next  fifteen  years  this  space  was  crossed  and  recrossed 
until,  by  the  end  of  1883,  the  open  frontier  was  gone  forever, 
and  the  United  States  was  equipped  with  a  national  railroad 
system  of  110,414  miles  that  enabled  every  region  in  the 
country  to  find  a  market  for  its  products  and  that  worked 
continuously  to  lower  the  costs  of  delivery  from  maker  to 
consumer. 

In  the  years  between  1869  and  1883,  four  continental 
railroads,  all  encouraged  by  grants  of  land  by  Congress, 
were    carried    to    completion.       The    Northern    Land 
Pacific  was  chartered  in  1864  to  run  from  Lake    grants  to 
Superior  to  Puget  Sound ;  the  Atlantic  and  Pacific 
was  to  be  built  from  southwestern  Missouri  to  southern 
California  and  was  chartered  in  1866.     The  Texas  Pacific, 
authorized  in  1871,  was  the  last  of  the  land-grant  continen 
tal  railroads,  and  was  proposed  to  be  built  from  the  junc 
tion  point  of  Texas,   Arkansas,    and   Louisiana,    \\rest   to 
California.     The  Atchison,  Topeka,  and  Santa  Fe  received 
a  local  land  grant  given  by  Congress  to  Kansas  and  built 


58      RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

southwest  over  the  Santa  Fe  Trail  and  down  the  valley  of 
the  Rio  Grande.  All  of  these  railroads  were  started  before 
the  panic  of  1873,  and  the  completion  of  all  was  delayed 
until  the  depression  following  that-  panic  had  spent  its 
force. 

The  construction  gangs  of  the  continental  railroads  re 
appeared  upon  the  high  plains  in  the  building  seasons  of 
1878  and  1879.  In  the  interval  of  depression,  steel  rails 
had  increased  in  popularity  and  structural  steel  had  begun 
to  be  available  to  take  the  place  of  timber  and  masonry. 
The  discoveries  of  Sir  Henry  Bessemer  and  the  resulting 
processes  for  the  commercial  manufacture  of  steel  took 
place  in  the  preceding  decade,  but  the  output  of  the  rolling- 
mills  was  not  sufficient  for  the  needs  of  building  before 
1873.  The  use  of  steel  wrought  a  revolution  in  the  construc 
tion  of  bridges,  in  naval  engineering,  and  in  city  architec 
ture,  but  nowhere  was  the  change  more  welcome  than  in 
railroad-building  where  the  steel  rail  provided  for  the  first 
time  a  safe  and  durable  roadway  for  the  rolling  stock. 

The  Southern  Pacific  of  California,  although  it  had  no 
continental  franchise  of  its  own,  led  in  the  completion  of 
the  Southern  group  of  railroads.  By  1883  through  trains 
were  running  over  its  tracks  to  the  Colorado  River,  and 
thence  east  over  three  lines  to  the  Mississippi.  It  estab 
lished  traffic  arrangements  with  the  Atchison,  Topeka,  and 
Santa  Fe,  which  took  its  trains  to  Kansas  City  and  St. 
Louis;  and  with  the  Texas  Pacific,  which  took  them  across 
the  whole  width  of  Texas  from  El  Paso  to  Texarkana;  and 
it  acquired  local  lines  in  southern  Texas  through  San  An 
tonio  and  Houston  to  New  Orleans. 

The  opening  of  the  Southern  continental  railroads  took 
place  in  1882  and  1883.  The  successful  operation  of  the 
lines  called  for  a  degree  of  team-work  unusual  on  the  rail 
roads,  notorious  for  their  rate  wars  and  their  cut-throat 
competition.  The  Western  magnates,  drawn  into  the  rail 
road  business  to  build  the  Central  Pacific,  and  staying  in 
it  to  control  the  Southern  Pacific  and  its  eastern  connec 
tions,  desired  to  simplify  their  holdings.  They  secured  in 


THE  NATIONAL  TRANSPORTATION  PLANT       59 

1884  a  charter  from  the  State  of  Kentucky  for  a  Southern 
Pacific  Company  which  they  operated  as  a  holding  cor 
poration  for  their  Western  roads.  They  secured  their 
charter  as  far  away  from  the  location  of  the  railroads  as 
they  could  so  as  to  minimize  the  risk  of  public  interference 
with  their  business.  The  Southern  Pacific  system,  which 
emerged  from  their  construction  and  manipulation,  domi 
nated  the  whole  southwestern  quarter  of  the  United  States. 
Henry  Villard,  a  journalist  of  German  birth,  played  the 
most  prominent  part  in  the  completion  of  the  Northern 
Pacific  Railway.  Jay  Cooke,  the  financier  of  The  North_ 
the  Civil  War,  and  the  best-known  American  em  Pacific 

•  1      -I  1     Railway 

banker  of  the  sixties,  had  undertaken  to  build 
this  road  and  had  been  broken  by  it  in  1873.  From  Duluth 
at  the  tip  of  Lake  Superior  it  had  been  built  to  the  Missouri 
River  before  the  panic  stopped  it,  and  it  had  constructed  a 
few  miles  in  Washington  near  its  terminal  city  of  Tacoma. 
In  1879  construction  was  renewed  from  the  Missouri  River 
to  the  junction  of  the  Columbia  and  Snake  near  old  Fort 
Walla  Walla.  At  this  point  Henry  Villard,  who  had  ac 
quired  control  of  the  Oregon  Railway  and  Navigation  Com 
pany,  began  to  exert  pressure  upon  the  Northern  Pacific 
to  secure  favorable  terms  for  his  rail  and  steamship  lines  in 
the  Northwest.  He  failed  to  secure  these  terms  by  open 
negotiation,  but  was  able  to  raise  a  large  sum  among  his 
New  York  friends  to  form  a  " blind  pool"  for  a  profitable 
private  speculation.  With  the  funds  of  the  pool  he  bought 
secretly  enough  stock  to  control  both  the  Northern  Pacific 
and  the  Oregon  Railway  and  Navigation  Company  and 
organized  the  Oregon  and  Trans-Continental  as  a  holding 
company  to  manage  it. 

The  Northern  Pacific  line  was  opened  in  September, 
1883,  but  failed  to  arouse  much  comment  because  the  news 
value  of  Pacific  railroads  had  recently  been  lessened  by  the 
completion  of  the  Southern  Pacific  links.  Villard  made  a 
great  celebration  of  it,  with  a  special  train  and  many  in 
vited  guests,  but  his  road  traversed  an  unsettled  country 
and  was  in  financial  trouble  from  the  start. 


6o     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

The  Denver  and  Rio  Grande,  working  in  cooperation 
with  the  Chicago,  Burlington,  and  Quincy,  opened  another 
through  service  almost  continental  in  its  extent  in  the  sum 
mer  of  1883.  Its  tracks  from  DeriVer  to  Ogden  followed 
the  royal  gorge  of  the  Arkansas  River,  and  in  Ogden  it  made 
a  connection  with  the  Union  Pacific  and  lines  leading  to  the 
Northwest. 

The  continental  frontier,  first  pierced  by  a  railroad  in 
1869,  was  completely  destroyed  by  1884.  Along  six  differ 
ent  lines,  between  New  Orleans  and  St.  Paul,  it  had  been 
made  possible  to  cross  the  sometime  American  Desert  to 
the  Pacific  States.  No  large  portion  of  the  United  States 
remained  beyond  the  reach  of  easy  colonization.  Instead  of 
a  waste  that  forbade  national  unity,  and  compelled  a  rudi 
mentary  civilization  in  its  presence,  a  thousand  plains 
stations  beckoned  for  colonists  and  long  lines  of  railroads 
bound  the  nation  into  an  economic  and  political  unit.  That 
which  General  Sheridan  had  foreseen  in  1882  was  now  a  fact. 
He  had  written:  "As  the  railroads  overtook  the  successive 
lines  of  isolated  frontier  posts  and  settlements  spread  out 
over  country  no  longer  requiring  military  protection,  the 
army  vacated  its  temporary  shelters  and  marched  on  into 
remote  regions  beyond,  there  to  repeat  and  continue  its 
pioneer  work.  In  rear  of  the  advancing  line  of  troops  the 
primitive  'dugouts'  and  cabins  of  the  frontiersmen  were 
steadily  replaced  by  the  tasteful  houses,  thrifty  farms,  neat 
villages,  and  busy  towns  of  a  people  who  knew  how  best  to 
employ  the  vast  resources  of  the  great  West.  The  civiliza 
tion  from  the  Atlantic  is  now  reaching  out  toward  that  rap 
idly  approaching  it  from  the  direction  of  the  Pacific,  the 
long  intervening  strip  of  territory,  extending  from  the  Brit 
ish  possessions  to  Old  Mexico,  yearly  growing  narrower; 
finally  the  dividing  lines  will  entirely  disappear  and  the 
mingling  settlements  absorb  the  remnants  of  the  once 
powerful  Indian  nations  who,  fifteen  years  ago,  vainly  at 
tempted  to  forbid  the  destined  progress  of  the  age." 

The  completion  of  the  continental  railroads  made  possi 
ble  the  adoption  of  a  reform  long  needed  for  the  comfort  of 


THE  NATIONAL  TRANSPORTATION  PLANT       61 

the  traveling  public.  In  England,  with  the  limited  dis 
tances,  it  had  been  possible  to  extend  the  time  standard 
of  Greenwich  Observatory  over  the  whole  island  time 
without  causing  great  inconvenience.  In  France  the  time 
of  Paris  had  been  made  the  standard  time,  but  in  the 
United  States  with  a  range  of  fifty  degrees  in  longitude, 
meaning  a  difference  in  true  time  of  some  three  hours  be 
tween  the  oceans,  no  single  standard  could  be  adopted. 
Every  railroad  followed  its  own  preference  in  adjusting  its 
time-tables,  and  in  cities  like  Pittsburgh,  Chicago,  and  St. 
Louis,  where  large  numbers  of  railroads  converged,  each 
with  its  own  system,  the  traveler  needed  to  have  his  wits 
about  him  when  he  handled  the  railroad  guides.  A  stand 
ard  time  convention  held  in  the  spring  of  1883  found  some 
fifty-six  standards  of  time  in  use  in  the  United  States.  Later 
in  the  year  the  owners  of  nearly  eighty  thousand  miles  of 
railroad  agreed  to  the  adoption  of  four  zones,  each  uni 
formly  operating  on  a  single  standard.  On  November  18, 
1883,  standard  time  came  into  existence. 

With  the  continental  railroads  built,  the  transportation 
plant  of  the  United  States  was  substantially  complete,  and 
although  its  mileage  continued  to  grow,  the  future  growth 
was  one  of  detail  and  improvement  of  local  service.  The 
rapidity  with  which  the  continental  roads  were  thrust  across 
the  plains  and  the  mountains  to  the  Pacific,  following  the 
trails  of  the  overland  emigrants  and  searching  out  the  min 
ing  camps  of  the  Western  Territories,  brought  an  unex 
pected  strain  upon  both  the  General  Land  Office  and  the 
Post-Office  Department,  with  the  result  that  the  latter 
broke  down  and  became  the  victim  of  a  notorious  scandal 
in  1 88 1,  while  the  Land  Office  needed  a  thorough  overhaul 
ing  by  the  successor  of  Arthur. 

The  task  of  the  Postmaster-General  to  deliver  the  mails 
was  susceptible  of  routine  administration  in  those  parts  of 
the  country  where  the  population  was  thickly  spread  in 
permanent  residences.  The  mail  service  to  the  frontier  was 
the  most  expensive  and  the  most  difficult  to  administer,  but 
the  mail  routes  followed  the  wagon-roads  of  the  farmers 


62      RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

with  considerable  success.  In  the  mining  region  of  the  Far 
West  there  was  no  such  certainty.  At  best  the  mines  were 
hundreds  of  miles  away  from  the  larger  centers  of  settled 
life.  The  transitory  character  of  the  mining  camp  made  it 
possible  for  a  city  of  ten  thousand  inhabitants  to  appear 
within  a  single  month  and  to  disappear  as  rapidly.  The 
mining  communities  demanded  a  mail  service  sufficiently 
elastic  to  keep  up  with  their  shiftings  from  place  to  place, 
and  Congress  recognized  this  need  by  providing  special 
treatment  for  the  Western  mail  routes. 

The  practice  of  the  Post-Office  Department  was  to  divide 
all  mail  routes  into  two  classes,  according  as  the  pouches 
were  carried  by  train  or  boat,  or  by  some  other  conveyance. 
The  latter  group,  Indicated  on  the  Post-Office's  lists  by 
stars,  were  known  as  the  "star  routes"  and  included  those 
services  rendered  by  wagon,  stagecoach,  or  mail  rider. 

The  longest  and  most  important  of  the  star  routes  served 
the  remote  settlements  in  the  Western  plains  and  moun 
tains.  They  were  subject  to  the  sudden  and  unexpected 
demands  of  a  shifting  population  that  became  more  insist 
ent  as  the  population  of  the  plains  increased  and  as  the  ad 
vancing  railroads  encouraged  wider  settlement.  The  or 
dinary  mail  routes  were  advertised  and  let  at  fixed  prices  to 
the  contractors  who  operated  them,  but  in  the  case  of  the 
star  routes  the  law  permitted  a  readjustment  of  compensa 
tion  without  readvertising  the  route  in  case  a  need  should 
arise  for  increased  service  or  greater  expedition.  The 
Second  Assistant  Postmaster-General,  whose  duty  it  was  to 
adjust  the  mail  service  to  the  fluctuating  demands  upon  it, 
became  in  1881  a  central  figure  in  the  star-route  frauds. 

For  several  years  before  1881  Congress  was  irritated  by 
the  fact  that  the  financial  needs  of  the  star  routes  could  not 
Star-route  be  anticipated,  and  that  the  office  was  being 
frauds  operated  without  reference  to  available  funds, 

but  in  reliance  upon  deficiency  appropriations.  In  the  post- 
office  hearings  testimony  was  taken  to  show  the  uncertain 
ties  of  the  service  and  the  impossibility  of  reducing  it  to 
schedule.  The  star  routes  were  investigated  in  1878  and 


THE  NATIONAL  TRANSPORTATION  PLANT       63 

shown  to  be  in  an  unsatisfactory  condition,  partly  because 
of  the  financial  irresponsibility  of  the  frontier  mail  con 
tractors.  Washington  became  conscious  of  a  group  of  con 
sistent  bidders  for  the  star  routes,  among  whom  the  most 
prominent  were  Stephen  W.  Dorsey  and  various  of  his  rela 
tives.  Dorsey  was  a  former  Senator  from  Arkansas  and  as 
secretary  of  the  Republican  National  Committee  managed 
Garfield's  campaign  in  1880. 

Thomas  J.  Brady,  in  charge  of  the  star  routes  as  Second 
Assistant  Postmaster-General,  was  under  suspicion  of  mis 
management  and  extravagance  in  1880,  and  resigned  his 
office  under  pressure  from  the  President  in  April,  1881, 
while  the  Senate  was  deadlocked  over  the  New  York  Cus- 
tom-House  appointment.  The  charge  against  Brady,  as 
rumor  popularly  stated  it,  was  that  he  had  acted  in  collu 
sion  with  a  ring  of  political  star-route  contractors,  of  which 
Dorsey  was  the  chief;  that  the  favored  contractors  had  put 
in  fictitious  bids  for  the  star  routes  and  had  secured  the 
contracts  because  their  bids  were  below  the  actual  cost  of 
the  service  to  any  honest  contractor;  that  upon  receiving 
the  contracts  they  had  by  collusion  and  fraud  produced 
evidence  in  favor  of  accelerating  the  mails  or  increasing  the 
service  over  their  routes,  and  that  Brady  had  criminally 
raised  the  compensation  to  an  unreasonable  amount.  In 
134  routes  originally  awarded  at  $143,169,  the  compensa 
tion  was  thus  raised  to  $622,808.  After  raising  the  com 
pensation  the  favored  contractors  sublet  the  routes  and 
divided  the  proceeds  among  themselves.  It  was  charged 
that  they  had  also  contributed  generously  to  the  Republi 
can  campaign  funds.  "It  is  difficult  to  believe,"  said  the 
Stalwart  Chicago  Inter-Ocean,  "that  he  [Brady]  was  not  in 
league  with  a  set  of  unscrupulous  contractors  to  defraud 
the  Government." 

Brady  resigned  under  pressure,  denying  his  guilt,  and 
Washington  gossip  was  informed  that  he  would  never  be 
prosecuted    because   Garfield    was    himself   in-    The  Hub- 
volved  and  because  Brady  possessed  letters  that   bel1  letter 
would  involve  others  in  his  downfall.    A  few  days  after  his 


64     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

retirement,  a  letter  written  by 'Garfield  while,  a  candidate, 
to  the  chairman  of  the  Republican  campaign  committee,  was 
given  to  the  press,  and  it  was  threatened  that  more  would 
follow.  The  Hubbell  letter  was  written  in  a  dark  moment 
of  the  campaign,  when  party  funds  were  low,  and  there  was 
doubt  as  to  whether  the  Stalwarts  would  support  the  ticket. 
"My  dear  Hubbell,"  wrote  Garfield  from  Mentor,  August 
23,  1880,  "Yours  of  the  iQth  instant  is  received.  Please 
say  to  Brady  that  I  hope  he  will  give  us  all  the  assistance 
possible.  I  think  he  can  help  effectively.  Please  tell  me 
how  the  departments  are  doing."  The  murder  of  Garfield 
before  the  trial  of  Brady  prevented  further  revelations  if 
indeed  there  were  any  to  be  made,  but  Attorney-General 
MacVeagh  proceeded  to  prepare  the  cases,  employing  in  the 
work  Benjamin  Harrison  Brewster,  whom  Arthur  selected 
to  succeed  him  as  Attorney-General.  The  trial  and  con 
viction  of  Guiteau  was  dragging  out  its  fifty-three  days  of 
unseemly  court-room  conduct  when  the  first  of  the  star- 
route  cases  came  to  trial  in  Washington  and  was  dismissed 
on  technical  grounds.  One  of  the  accused,  M.  C.  Rerdell, 
a  former  private  secretary  of  Dorsey,  had  already  confessed 
his  guilt  and  filed  affidavits  showing  the  nature  of  the  fraud. 
A  Washington  grand  jury  indicted  Dorsey  and  Brady  and 
several  others  in  February,  1882,  and  suits  against  indi- 
Acquittal  vidual  contractors  were  brought  locally  through- 
of  Dorsey  out  the  country.  The  trial  took  place  in  the 
summer  with  Robert  Ingersoll  defending  the 
accused,  two  of  whom,  minor  accomplices,  were  found 
guilty.  The  conviction  was  set  aside  by  the  court  and  a 
new  trial  was  arranged  for  the  summer  of  1883,  Dorsey 
meanwhile  publishing  a  long  public  statement  of  his  in 
nocence  on  December  i,  1882,  as  well  as  numerous  letters 
tending  to  show  his  political  intimacy  with  General  Gar- 
field.  He  resigned  as  secretary  of  the  Republican  National 
Committee  in  January,  1883,  and  was  finally  acquitted  in 
June  in  spite  of  the  testimony  of  Rerdell.  None  of  the 
principals  of  the  star-route  frauds  was  ever  convicted,  but 
the  testimony  throws  a  strong  light  upon  the  conditions 


THE  NATIONAL  TRANSPORTATION  PLANT       65 

prevailing  in  the  Far  West  in  the  last  days  of  the  old  fron 
tier,  and  upon  the  character  of  the  civil  service  that  Presi 
dent  Hayes  had  tried  in  vain  to  reform. 


BIBLIOGRAPHICAL  NOTE 

The  best  works  on  the  continental  railroads  are  L.  H.  Haney,  A  Con 
gressional  History  of  Railroads,  1850-1887  (1910),  E.  V.  Smalley,  Northern 
Pacific  Railroad  (1883),  J.  P.  Davis,  The  Union  Pacific  Railway  (1894), 
and  C.  F.  Carter,  When  Railroads  Were  New  (1909).  Further  data  on  the 
Northern  Pacific  maybe  found  in  E.  P.  Oberholtzer,  Jay  Cooke  (1907),  and 
Henry  Villard,  Memoirs  (1904).  For  the  Canadian  Pacific,  see  Beckles 
Willson,  The  Life  of  Lord  Strathcona  and  Mount  Royal  (1915),  and  Walter 
Vaughan,  The  Life  and  Work  of  Sir  William  Van  Home  (1920);  for  the 
Great  Northern,  see  Joseph  G.  Pyle,  The  Life  of  James  J.  Hill  (1917). 
The  subject  is  specially  treated  in  the  monograph,  F.  L.  Paxson,  "The 
Pacific  Railroads  and  the  Disappearance  of  the  Frontier,"  in  the  American 
Historical  Association,  Annual  Report,  1907.  The  trend  of  falling  prices 
after  1879  may  be  studied  in  T.  E.  Burton  and  G.  S.  Selden,  A  Century  of 
Prices  (1919).  The  history  of  the  star  routes  must  still  be  dug  out  from 
the  newspaper  reports  of  the  trials  and  the  congressional  investigations. 


CHAPTER  Vll 

BUSINESS  AND  SOCIETY 

THE  completion  of  the  national  railroad  system  brought 
forces  into  operation  that  tended  to  reduce  prices  in  the 
years  that  followed,  and  made  it  possible  for  business  to  take 
advantage  of  the  wider  markets  that  were  made  available. 
In  March,  1881,  Howells  published,  in  the  Atlantic  Monthly, 
"The  Story  of  a  Great  Monopoly,"  by  Henry  Demarest 
Lloyd,  which  was  the  " first  volley"  in  a  national  attack 
upon  monopolies.  The  article  was  so  widely  read  that  it 
took  sev^en  editions  of  the  Atlantic  to  meet  the  demand, 
while  the  Standard  Oil  Company,  which  was  the  subject  of 
the  story,  took  a  leadership  among  the  unpopular  monopo 
lies  that  it  has  never  lost. 

The  petroleum  industry  began  about  1859,  when  means 
were  found  to  refine  the  crude  petroleum  that  existed  in 
widely  spread  deposits  in  the  Appalachian  re 
gion,  and  to  burn  the  kerosene  that  resulted 
for  illuminating  purposes.  The  kerosene  lamp  lengthened 
the  day  throughout  the  civilized  world  and  speedily  drove 
out  of  use  the  candles  and  the  animal  oils  upon  which 
society  had  formerly  been  forced  to  rely.  The  dim  and 
flickering  flame  of  the  gaslight  continued  to  be  adopted  and 
improved,  but  the  new  lamp  filled  such  a  genuine  want  that 
it  created  a  universal  market  for  petroleum. 

Between  1860  and  1880  the  petroleum  industry  passed 
through  its  speculative  stages,  while  John  D.  Rockefeller, 
of  Cleveland,  and  his  associates  gained  control  of  most  of 
the  refineries.  The  business  was  essentially  one  of  monop 
oly  character  because  of  the  heavy  investment  necessary 
before  the  oil  could  be  transported  with  economy,  and  the 
cheapness  of  transport  after  the  investment  had  been  made. 
In  the  oil  regions  any  farmer  could  sink  his  wells  and  pro 
duce  crude  petroleum  at  the  well  mouth  at  low  cost.  In 


BUSINESS  AND  SOCIETY 

the  early  years  this  was  carried  in  barrels  from  the  we01 
mouth  to  the  refinery  and  thence  to  the  retailer.  The  oil^ 
was  cheap  and  the  barrels  were  costly,  and  the  difficulties 
of  storage  and  transportation  controlled  the  price  of  oil. 
Tank-cars  were  invented  a  little  later  at  greater  initial  cost, 
but  with  greater  economies  in  operation,  while  the  owner  of 
tank-cars  was  able  to  bargain  to  advantage  with  the  trunk- 
line  railroads  for  the  business  of  hauling  them  to  tidewater. 
The  New  York  Central,  the  Erie,  the  Lackawanna,  the 
Pennsylvania,  and  the  Baltimore  and  Ohio  all  reached  the 
oil  region  and  scrambled  for  the  business,  offering  special  ad 
vantages  and  rebates  to  secure  the  traffic  of  the  larger  ship 
pers.  These  special  rates  made  it  possible  for  the  larger 
shippers  to  grow  still  larger,  and  none  of  the  refiners  ex 
celled  Rockefeller  in  skill  and  ingenuity  in  gaining  advan 
tage  from  the  unstable  railroad  rates. 

As  public  opinion  turned  against  special  rates  and  re 
bates  in  the  later  seventies,  the  pipe-line  from  oil-field  to 
refinery,  and  thence  to  distributing  points,  with  pumping- 
stations  en  route,  was  invented  to  take  over  much  of  the 
traffic  of  the  tank-cars.  These  pipe-lines  still  further  in 
creased  the  costs  for  construction,  yet  made  possible  more 
sweeping  economies  in  the  delivery  of  oil.  The  most  vex 
atious  portion  of  the  business  from  the  standpoint  of  the 
operators  was  the  great  number  of  rival  companies  and  their 
various  competing  policies.  In  January,  1882,  Rockefeller 
brought  about  a  combination  in  the  oil  business,  whereby 
the  stock  in  the  competing  companies  was  turned  over  to 
be  managed  by  a  board  of  trustees.  He  dominated  this 
board,  and  the  trust  that  it  created  produced  immediate 
harmony  in  the  oil-refining  business,  which  was  recognized 
at  once  in  spite  of  the  fact  that  the  agreement  itself  was  kept 
secret  for  several  years. 

The  oil  monopoly  raised  a  problem  in  politics  that  tended 
to  dim  the  recognition  of  the  importance  of  kerosene  in  mak 
ing  life  more  livable.  Another  monopoly,  openly  launched 
in  January,  1881,  brought  into  single  hands  another  of  the 
newer  inventions,  the  electric  telegraph. 


*      RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

The  story  of  Samuel  F.  B.  Morse  and  his  persistent 
struggle  to  secure  the  adoption  of  the  telegraph  and  to  re- 
The  tain  control  of  its  operation  is  one  of  the  most  in- 

telegraph  spiring  tales  in  the  field  of  industry.  After  its 
experimental  period  the  telegraph  became  a  reality  in  1844, 
and  spread  its  network  of  wires  over  the  nation  in  the  next 
few  years.  Like  the  early  railroad  lines  telegraph  wires 
were  stretched  piecemeal  by  a  multitude  of  rival  companies. 
At  the  end  of  the  seventies  consolidation  of  the  rival  com 
panies  had  progressed  so  far  that  three  organizations,  the 
Western  Union,  the  American  Union,  and  the  Atlantic  and 
Pacific  controlled  most  of  the  lines.  In  January,  1881,  Jay 
Gould  and  William  H.  Vanderbilt  brought  about  the  consoli 
dation  of  these  three  companies  in  the  Western  Union,  and 
the  newspapers  of  the  country  bitterly  described  themselves 
as  in  the  clutcnes  of  a  monster  monopoly. 

The  telegraph  was  discovered  by  the  random  reflection 
of  a  portrait  painter,  while  its  sister  instrument  was  patented 
The  by  Alexander  Graham  Bell,  an  elocutionist  who 

telephone  reached  his  idea  through  the  theory  of  acoustics. 
The  basic  patent  of  the  Bell  telephone  was  filed  in  February, 
1876,  and  at  the  Philadelphia  Centennial  the  interesting  toy 
was  on  exhibition,  where  it  aroused  the  excited  admiration 
of  the  Emperor  Dom  Pedro  of  Brazil.  With  the  assistance 
of  Theodore  N.  Vail,  Bell  put  his  patent  into  commercial  use 
and  before  the  end  of  the  decade  commercial  exchanges 
made  their  appearance  in  the  larger  cities.  There  were 
444,000  instruments  in  use  in  1890,  the  Bell  Telephone  com 
panies  had  approached  the  condition  of  monopoly,  but  the 
habits  of  business  had  undergone  a  greater  change  than  has 
been  produced  by  any  other  instrument  except  the  type 
writer. 

The  invention  of  a  practical  writing  machine  was  not  due 
to  chance,  but  to  long  experiment  by  many  inventors,  in 
The  which  Charles  Latham  Sholes  was  the  first  to  be 

typewriter  successful.  By  1874  ne  na<^  devised  a  machine 
with  movable  types  that  would  actually  write,  and  soon  after 
1880  several  typewriters  were  on  the  market.  It  took  many 


BUSINESS  AND  SOCIETY  69 

years  for  the  typewriter  to  overcome  the  prejudice  in  favor 
of  the  written  word  in  polite  and  formal  correspondence,  but 
its  easy  popularity  in  the  business  office  encouraged  inven 
tors  to  try  to  adapt  the  idea  to  typesetting.  Mark  Twain, 
who  spent  money  freely  when  he  had  it,  wasted  a  fortune  in 
this  search,  backing  the  wrong  inventor  of  a  typesetting 
machine.  Other  inventions  that  increased  the  ease  of  com 
munication  and  widened  the  influence  of  the  individual  in 
business  were  the  half-tone  process  that  made  it  possible 
to  reproduce  photographs  and  other  illustrations,  and  the 
photographic  dry  plate,  which  appeared  in  1878  and  brought 
the  camera  within  reach  of  every  one. 

The  increasing  use  of  electricity  invited  the  experiments 
that  were  made  by  Thomas  A.  Edison  to  perfect  the  incan 
descent  light.  In  his  experimental  laboratory  incandes- 
at  Menlo  Park,  New  Jersey,  he  carried  out  a  long  cent  Hshts 
series  of  experiments  in  a  deliberate  search  for  the  right  fila 
ment  and  the  proper  structure  of  the  glass  bulb.  The  arc 
light  was  already  here  and  there  in  use,  but  was  noisy  in 
operation  and  gave  at  best  only  a  flickering  light.  Edison 
was  successful  in  1879,  and  at  the  end  of  the  year  introduced 
a  perfected  light.  The  significance  of  the  incandescent  light 
was  instantly  seen.  Gas  companies  became  apprehensive 
as  to  their  future  revenues.  A  decade  later,  when  plans 
were  being  laid  for  the  decoration  of  the  World's  Fair  at 
Chicago,  it  was  possible  to  rely  upon  the  incandescent  light 
not  only  for  illumination,  but  for  artistic  and  easily  controlled 
effects  of  light.  The  phonograph  that  Edison  designed 
earlier  than  his  incandescent  light  was  a  workable  toy,  but 
developed  less  rapidly. 

The  new  inventions,  gaining  popularity  for  themselves 
in  the  early  eighties,  ran  parallel  to  a  wider  use  of  older  in 
ventions.  The  sewing  machine  fell  in  price  due  to  the  ex 
piration  of  its  basic  patent  rights  in  1877,  agricultural 
machinery  continued  to  be  improved  and  to  be  used  upon 
an  ever-wider  scale,  while  the  manufacture  of  the  new  de 
vices  brought  new  factories  into  existence  and  increased  the 
congestion  in  the  cities.  The  home  became  more  comfort- 


70      RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

able,  with  the  oil  lamp  and  the  sewing  machine;  and  into 
newer  homes  was  brought  the  luxury  of  the  telephone  and 
incandescent  lights,  as  the  central  stations  were  built  to 
provide  these  services.  The  increasing  size  of  the  cities 
raised  the  problem  of  rapid  transit,  with  New  York,  be 
cause  of  its  peculiar  topography,  leading  in  the  search 
for  improvements  in  transportation.  The  horse-cars  and 
omnibuses  that  provided  the  first  organized  traffic  in  the 
cities  came  to  be  regarded  as  too  slow  and  clumsy.  Ele 
vated  railroads  were  experimented  with  in  the  interests  of 
speed  and  safety,  and  before  1880  were  in  operation  in  New 
York.  A  bridge  across  the  East  River  to  Brooklyn,  much 
desired  for  a  similar  reason,  was  built  during  this  decade  and 
was  formally  opened  to  traffic  in  May,  1883.  Edison  was 
by  this  date  experimenting  with  an  electric-driven  trolley- 
car,  while  other  inventors  were  hoping  to  solve  the  problem 
by  means  of  cables  run  in  underground  conduits. 

The  Middle  and  Eastern  States  underwent  the  greatest 
change  as  the  industrial  reorganization  advanced.  The 
industrial  Western  States  were  most  affected  by  the  rail- 
reorgani-  way  growth.  The  Southern  States  in  these  same 
years  of  business  revival  showed  signs  of  re 
covery  from  the  depression  of  the  Civil- War  period,  and 
started  upon  an  independent  economic  life.  The  Southern 
railroads  were  nearly  extinct  in  1865,  and  their  rebuilding 
ran  through  many  years.  The  construction  of  great  rail 
road  bridges  across  the  Mississippi  at  St.  Louis  in  1874  and 
at  Memphis  in  1892  give  the  limits  for  the  period  in  which 
the  South  revived.  The  old  plantation  as  it  was  known  be 
fore  the  war  disappeared  in  the  economic  revolution,  and  in 
its  place  came  a  shrinkage  in  the  size  of  farms  and  an  in 
crease  in  the  number  of  tenant  farmers.  These  farmers, 
white  or  black,  still  devoted  themselves  chiefly  to  the  culti 
vation  of  cotton,  and  carried  a  burden  of  debt  as  heavy  as 
that  of  the  pioneer  farmer  in  the  Western  States.  The  debt 
of  the  Southern  farmer  held  him  to  the  cultivation  of  a 
single  crop,  the  loans  were  made  by  the  general  storekeeper 
in  the  form  of  credit  advances  secured  by  notes  upon  the 


BUSINESS  AND  SOCIETY  71 

forthcoming  cotton  crop,  and  it  was  to  the  interest  of  the 
creditor  to  secure  as  large  a  crop  as  possible  in  order  to 
safeguard  his  loans. 

The  credit  system  of  the  South  was  a  burden  upon  its 
development,  but  in  spite  of  it  a  new  spirit  was  visible  in 
the  former  Confederacy.  A  Cotton  States' 


Exposition  was  held  at  New  Orleans  in  1884  to    ment  of 
celebrate  the  hundredth  anniversary  of  the  earli 
est  cotton  exports  from  the  South.     The  exhibits  revealed 
the  economic  regeneration  that  was  under  way.      In  the 
next  few  years  the  development  of  the  railroad  systems  in 
duced  a  more  diversified  agriculture.     The  cotton-lands  of 
Texas  were  brought  into  use,  and  their  competition  reduced 
the  prosperity  of  the  older  cotton  States,  driving  these  to 
better  agriculture  and  the  cultivation  of  additional  crops. 

The  social  life  of  the  South  was  still  determined  by  the 
presence  of  its  negro  population.  The  unwillingness  of  the 
white  inhabitants  to  be  ruled  by  the  negro  vote  brought 
about  a  practical  nullification  of  the  Civil-  War  amendments 
to  the  Constitution.  The  right  of  the  negro  to  vote  was 
taken  away  from  him  by  fraud  or  force,  as  home  rule  was 
reestablished  in  the  early  seventies.  The  civil  rights  con 
ferred  upon  the  freedman  by  the  Fourteenth  Amendment 
and  enforced  by  subsequent  acts  of  Congress  were  declared 
by  the  Supreme  Court  in  the  Civil  Rights  Cases  of  1884  not 
to  include  the  right  to  equality  of  social  treatment.  In 
1890  Mississippi  adopted  an  educational  test  as  a  qualifi 
cation  for  suffrage  and  as  a  means  of  disfranchising  the 
negro  without  violating  the  Fifteenth  Amendment,  and  the 
other  Southern  States  soon  followed  suit.  The  South  as 
a  whole  was  recovering  its  self-confidence,  but  it  had  be 
come  politically  a  region  of  a  single  party. 

The  change  in  business,  whether  through  new  inventions 
or  through  the  reorganization  of  old  industries,  gave  oppor 
tunities  for  the  accumulation  of  private  fortunes    Money 
hitherto   unknown   in    the   United   States.      A    kin^s 
group  of  money  kings  arose,  with  fortunes  whose  existence 
appeared  to  challenge  the  success  of  the  existing  social 


72     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

order,  and  whose  personal  conduct  absorbed  public  atten 
tion  to  an  increasing  extent. 

The  earlier  American  fortunes  were  ordinarily  the  result 
of  commerce  or  banking.  In  1877* Commodore  Cornelius 
Vanderbilt  died  and  within  a  few  months  he  was  followed 
by  John  Jacob  Astor  and  A.  T.  Stewart,  who  with  him  were 
regarded  as  the  richest  men  in  America.  The  three  for 
tunes  thus  passed  on  to  other  hands  were  typical  of  different 
methods  of  accumulation.  Two  had  been  acquired,  one 
had  been  inherited.  The  original  John  Jacob  Astor,  a  Ger 
man  peddler,  came  to  America  near  the  close  of  the  Revolu 
tion  and  was  soon  identified  with  the  organization  of  the 
fur  trade  in  the  Northwest.  His  gains,  according  to  the 
popular  tradition,  were  invested  in  New  York  real  estate 
and  became  the  nucleus  of  an  estate  that  grew  in  value  as 
New  York  City  spread  up  Manhattan  Island  toward  the 
Bronx.  By  1877  it  had  become  the  greatest  of  American 
inherited  properties  and  was  becoming  the  foundation  of  a 
notable  family. 

Stewart  and  Vanderbilt  made  their  own  fortunes.  The 
former,  an  Irish  Immigrant,  became  a  general  merchant, 
and  his  New  York  store  was  started  before  his  death  upon 
the  course  of  development  that  produced  the  great  depart 
ment  store  of  the  next  decade.  Cornelius  Vanderbilt  earned 
his  honorary  title  of  " commodore"  by  operating  steam 
boat  lines  in  the  waters  around  New  York.  About  1867  he 
turned  his  savings  into  railroad  securities  and  soon  became 
the  dominating  master  of  the  New  York  Central.  His 
son,  William  K.  Vanderbilt,  took  on  the  guidance  of  the 
business  before  his  father's  death,  and  later  defended  the 
will,  in  which  the  Commodore  had  held  most  of  his  wealth 
together  and  passed  it  on  to  the  favorite  son.  The  younger 
Vanderbilt  carried  the  New  York  Central  lines  through  the 
strikes  of  1877  with  a  minimum  of  interruption,  and  in  1882 
became  identified  with  one  of  the  famous  phrases  in  Ameri 
can  business.  The  Pennsylvania  Railroad  had  just  started 
a  new  fast  train  to  Chicago  and  when  Vanderbilt  was  asked 
what  the  New  York  Central  would  do  to  meet  the  public 


BUSINESS  AND  SOCIETY  73 

expectation  of  a  rival  train,  he  replied  briefly  (so  the  re 
porter  insisted),  "The  public  be  damned."  The  phrase 
gained  a  wide  and  embarrassing  circulation  and  was  given 
interpretations  not  intended  by  its  user,  but  did  not  mis 
represent  the  practical  attitude  of  most  railroads  and  many 
other  great  industrial  enterprises  of  its  day. 

The  newer  fortunes,  whose  owners  were  now  working 
themselves  into  the  public  eye,  were  often  too  huge  to  have 
been  accumulated  by  the  efforts  of  a  single  man,  and  were  in 
many  cases  the  results  of  successful  speculation  or  of  well- 
directed  team-work.  Jay  Gould  and  Thomas  A.  Scott 
were  representative  of  the  railroad  group.  The  latter,  pres 
ident  of  the  Pennsylvania  Railroad,  was  also  identified 
with  many  Western  roads  and  was  engaged  in  1878  in  an 
effort  to  secure  the  land  subsidy  voted  to  the  Texas  Pacific 
Railway  in  1871,  but  forfeited  through  non-construction. 
The  New  York  Sun  insinuated  that  the  Texas  Pacific  pool 
had  induced  the  Southern  States  to  accept  Hayes  as  Presi 
dent  without  revolt  on  the  promise  that  Congress  would 
do  something  for  the  Texas  Pacific.  Scott  at  least  was  oc 
cupied  in  the  construction  and  operation  of  railroads.  Jay 
Gould's  connection  with  them  was  chiefly  speculative. 

Gould  gained  his  place  before  the  public  as  one  of  the 
gold  conspirators  who  tried  in  1869  to  corner  the  market 
and  raise  the  premium  on  gold.  A  decade  later  he  was 
associated  with  the  reorganization  of  the  Union  Pacific  and 
the  Kansas  Pacific  as  they  struggled  to  get  on  their  feet 
after  the  depression  of  the  seventies,  and  a  little  later  he 
put  the  Wabash  system  together.  In  1880  he-  was  sus 
pected  of  being  the  principal  financial  supporter  of  James 
G.  Elaine.  He  died  in  1892,  turning  his  whole  estate  into 
family  channels.  ,. 

The  fortunes  of  Andrew  Carnegie  and  John  D.  Rocke 
feller,  becoming  notable  in  this  decade,  were  founded  upon 
team-work  and  the  exploitation  of  natural  resources.  Each 
was  believed  capable  of  ruthless  competition,  but  each  was 
the  center  of  a  group  of  associates  that  added  to  the  re 
sources  of  the  country.  /  Oil  and  steel  were  brought  into  a 


74     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

new  relationship  with  society  as  the  industrial  revolution 
progressed,  and  the  profits  that  accrued  as  the  Standard 
Oil  companies  and  the  Carnegie  Steel  interests  rose  to 
national  ascendancy  were  largely  J-.fje  result  of  a  service 
actually  rendered.  $•*•  cU^  sxy 

The  American  millionaire  became  a  figure  in  all  the  cap 
itals  of  the  world,  as  well  as  in  American  society,  and  re 
ceived  a  full-length  portrait  in  the  Rise  of  Silas  Lapham 
(1885).  The  ambition  to  found  families  was  early  recog 
nized,  and  as  the  great  wealth  of  millionaires  made  it  diffi 
cult  for  poorer  persons  to  associate  with  them,  they  flocked 
by  themselves  at  Saratoga  Springs  and  Newport,  and  gave 
the  incentive  for  the  development  of  winter  resorts  in  Flor 
ida  and  southern  California.  Their  social  habits  were  con 
stantly  under  criticism  by  a  public  that  regarded  them  with 
a  mixture  of  pride  and  exasperation.  In  1886  a  group  of 
wealthy  New  Yorkers  opened  a  residence  colony  of  their 
own  at  Tuxedo  Park,  on  the  former  estate  of  Pierre  Loril- 
lard,  where  they  built  a  casino,  and  playgrounds,  and  cot 
tages,  and  acquired  the  distinction  without  knowing  it  of 
bringing  the  country  club  into  American  life. 

The  plainer  Americans,  admitting  no  inferiority  and  irri 
tated  when  travelers  spoke  of  the  middle  and  the  lower 
Popular  classes,  organized  recreation  of  their  own  as  the 
cities  became  too  congested  for  comfort.  The 
population  of  New  York  City  discovered  Coney  Island  in 
1876  on  an  attractive  beach  that  had  been  unoccupied  a 
few  years  before,  and  the  drive  thither  from  Brooklyn  was 
crowded  with  trotting  horses  and  showy  carriages,  while 
steamboat  lines  and  special  railroads  moved  the  larger 
crowds.  Cape  May,  famous  before  the  Civil  War  as  a 
summer  resort,  was  now  outclassed  by  Atlantic  City,  whose 
nearness  to  Philadelphia  made  it  an  easy  outlet  for  the  city 
crowd. 

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL  NOTE 

Ida  M.  Tarbell,  History  of  the  Standard  Oil  Company  (1904),  is  the  best 
work  of  its  kind.  John  D.  Rockefeller,  Random  Reminiscences  of  Men  and 
Events  (1909  ,  is  of  slight  value.  E.  L.  Morse  (ed.),  Samuel  F.  B.  Morse^ 


BUSINESS  AND  SOCIETY  75 

His  Letters  and  Journals  (1914),  is  an  invaluable  contribution  to  the  history 
of  the  telegraph;  less  substantial  are  Herbert  N.  Casson,  History  of  the 
Telephone  (1910),  F.  T.  Cooper,  Thomas  A.  Edison  (1914),  and  F.  J. 
Garbit,  The  Phonograph  and  its  Inventor,  Thomas  Alvah  Edison  (1878). 
Mrs.  Burton  Harrison,  History  of  the  City  of  New  York  (1896),  describes  the 
changes  in  the  material  structure  of  that  city.  Robert  P.  Brooks,  The 
Agrarian  Revolution  in  Georgia,  1865-1912  (1914),  gives  a  detailed  picture 
of  the  changes  in  one  Southern  State.  Burton  J.  Hendrick,  The  Age  of  Big 
Business  (1919),  gives  entertaining  biographical  sketches  of  several  of  the 
wealthiest  captains  of  industry. 


CHAPTER  VHI 
REFORM 

WIDESPREAD  prosperity  followed  the  resumption  of  specie 
payments  in  1879.  Railroads  and  factories  provided  con 
stant  demand  for  labor,  while  the  former  opened  up  great 
areas  of  public  domain  for  purposes  of  farming.  The  fall  in 
prices,  that  had  seemed  a  menace  to  the  existence  of  the 
farmer  in  the  days  of  the  depression,  ceased  to  worry  him 
in  the  good  years  that  followed.  The  parties  of  protest, 
born  of  hard  times,  dwindled  between  1878  and  1882,  and 
lost  most  of  their  supporters  except  the  incorrigible  ideal 
ists,  who  were  unwilling  to  put  up  with  the  compromises  of 
the  larger  parties  and  persisted  in  hoping  that  a  third  party 
might  be  the  vehicle  of  real  reform. 

In  the  Congressional  elections  of  1882,  the  Democratic 
Party  rushed  to  the  attack  with  party  capital  derived  from 
Congres-  tne  misfortunes  of  the  Republicans,  and  here  and 
sionalelec-  there,  where  factional  controversy  existed  in 

tions,  1882        .p.          ,  t.  .   .  , 

Republican  communities,  there  was  unearned 
political  profit  for  Democratic  and  Greenback  candidates. 
President  Arthur  was  performing  his  duties  in  partial  iso 
lation,  with  his  former  Stalwart  friends  chilled  by  his  deser 
tion,  and  independents  not  satisfied  of  his  complete  repent 
ance.  The  star-route  frauds  were  at  the  height  of  their 
notoriety,  and  were  used  to  show  a  demoralized  condition 
in  Republican  administration.  The  varied  attempts  of  the 
Administration  to  save  its  party  were  turned  to  its  disad 
vantage.  The  Secretary  of  the  Treasury,  Charles  A.  Fol- 
ger,  was  nominated  for  governor  of  New  York  and  was  sup 
ported  vigorously  by  the  Administration,  with  the  result 
that  he  was  treated  as  a  machine  candidate  and  was  beaten 
by  a  relatively  unknown  man,  Grover  Cleveland,  who  stood 
as  the  champion  of  reform. 

The  Republican  Congressional  campaign  was  managed 


REFORM  77 

by  the  same  J.  A.  Hubbell,  of  Michigan,  to  whom  Garfield 
had  written  his  unwise  letter  in  1880.  In  a  series  of  circu 
lars  which  Democratic  papers  copied  widely,  he  called  upon 
the  federal  office-holders  for  assessments  to  the  party  funds, 
and  declared  that  these  were  voluntary,  when  taxed  with 
violation  of  the  anti-assessment  law  of  1876. 

The  appeal  for  reform  attracted  much  attention.  Hub- 
bell  himself  lost  his  seat  in  Congress,  and  a  Democratic 
House  of  Representatives,  chosen  to  take  office  Tariff 
in  1883,  became  an  admonition  to  the  Republi-  revision 
cans  in  the  short  session  of  1882-83  to  pass  what  laws  they 
could  before  they  lost  control.  A  revision  of  the  tariff  was 
the  most  pressing  of  their  necessities,  for  there  were  signs 
that  the  Democratic  Party  was  demanding  a  reform  in  the 
revenue  system,  and  that  good  Republicans  were  unwilling 
to  defend  it.  "There  are  stupendous  interests  in  America 
which  have  grown  into  monopolies  through  the  artificial 
nurture  of  the  tariff,"  said  the  Stalwart  New  York  Herald. 
The  Secretary  of  the  Treasury  saw  it  from  a  different  angle, 
and  wrote  in  his  annual  report  of  1882,  "What  now  perplexes 
the  Secretary  is  not  wherefrom  he  may  get  revenue  and 
enough  for  the  pressing  needs  of  the  Government,  but 
whereby  he  shall  turn  back  into  the  flow  of  business  the 
more  than  enough  for  those  needs  that  has  been  with 
drawn  from  the  people." 

The  tariff  situation  in  1882  had  come  about  as  much  by 
accident  as  by  design,  and  in  its  immediate  operation  was 
the  heritage  of  financial  reconstruction.  The  Morrill 
tariff  of  1 86 1,  passed  by  a  Republican  Congress  in  the  last 
days  of  the  administration  of  James  Buchanan,  was  a 
moderately  protective  measure,  and  provided  the  back 
ground  for  all  tariff  legislation  of  the  next  two  decades. 
The  details  and  rates  of  this  tariff  were  greatly  changed 
through  the  necessities  of  the  Civil  War,  and  it  was  dis 
covered  that  the  internal  revenue  taxes  and  the  tariff  rates 
must  be  adjusted  in  harmony  with  each  other.  The  situa 
tion  produced  by  the  Morrill  tariff  was  changed  for  many 
American  manufacturers  when  they  were  compelled  to  pay 


78      RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

the  heavy  internal  taxes  levied  upon  incomes,  trades,  and 
manufactured  goods  before  1865.  Their  European  com 
petitors,  who  could  not  be  required  to  bear  similar  burdens, 
received  an  advantage  in  the  competitive  market.  Con 
gress  yielded  to  the  pressure  of  manufacturers  to  restore  the 
equilibrium  of  trade  by  increasing  tariff  rates  in  order  to 
balance  the  burden  placed  upon  domestic  manufacturers  by 
the  internal  revenues.  Every  time  the  internal  taxes  were 
increased  during  the  war,  Congress  was  called  upon  to  in 
crease  the  tariff  rates  as  well,  and  in  1865  both  sources  were 
yielding  revenues  beyond  anything  hitherto  known  in 
American  experience.  The  tariff  in  that  year  brought  in 
$84,000,000;  the  internal  revenue,  $209,000,000. 

The  program  of  financial  reconstruction  called  for  the 
reestablishment  of  public  credit  and  the  redemption  of  the 
greenbacks,  as  well  as  the  lowering  of  revenues  to  a  peace 
basis.  In  reducing  the  revenues  the  difficulties  were  un 
even.  The  internal  taxes  had  no  friends,  and  public  opinion 
generally  approved  the  reduction  and  elimination  of  the  in 
come  and  stamp  taxes,  and  the  other  forms  of  excise  that 
had  been  borne  as  a  patriotic  duty.  Tariff  revision  was 
attended  with  great  difficulty.  At  each  suggestion  of  this, 
manufacturers  hurried  to  Washington  to  protest  against  the 
injury  to  their  business  that  would  occur  if  the  rates  were 
lowered,  and  Congressmen  made  common  cause  with  each 
other  to  protect  their  constituents  from  these  losses. 

By  1873  most  of  the  internal  revenue  taxes  had  been 
withdrawn,  leaving  industry  protected  not  only  by  the  orig 
inal  rates  of  the  Morrill  tariff,  but  by  the  additional  com 
pensatory  rates  that  had  been  added  to  offset  the  internal 
war  taxes.  In  most  cases  there  was  now  no  justification  for 
these  extra  rates,  which  had  come  to  give  an  unintended  and 
accidental  protection,  but  as  a  matter  of  practical  politics, 
it  was  difficult  to  get  rid  of  them  because  they  were  in 
timately  tied  up  with  the  personal  profit  of  influential 
citizens. 

A  flat  reduction  of  ten  per  cent  in  tariff  rates  was  voted 
by  Congress  in  1872.  This  was  less  than  the  amount  of  the 


REFORM  79 

accidental  protection,  but  seemed  to  be  more  than  the 
country  could  bear  when  a  few  months  later  the  panic  of 
1873  made  hard  times  universal,  reducing  American  pur 
chases  abroad,  and  lowering  the  national  revenue  until  it 
was  insufficient  for  the  needs  of  the  Government.  By 
1879,  when  prosperity  came  back,  most  persons  had  for 
gotten  that  the  tariff  rates  had  not  existed  forever.  The 
tariff  question  was  entirely  out  of  politics,  and  manufacturers 
enjoyed  almost  unchallenged  the  extra  profits  conferred  on 
them  by  the  accident  of  financial  reconstruction. 

There  had  been  some  theoretical  opposition  to  the  tariff 
and  protection  even  through  the  period  of  depression,  and 
the  principles  of  free  trade  were  advanced  by  a  group  of 
economists  among  whom  David  A.  Wells,  Edward  Atkinson, 
and»  William  Graham  Sumner  were  the  leaders.  Their 
teachings  aroused  indignant  rejoinders  from  practical  busi 
ness  men.  "In  nothing  is  it  easier  to  show  stupidity  than 
in  the  framing  of  a  tariff  law,"  wrote  Joseph  Wharton,  one 
of  the  most  important  of  the  Pennsylvania  ironmasters,  who 
founded  a  school  of  finance  and  economy  in  the  University, 
of  Pennsylvania  in  1881  to  teach  what  he  regarded  as  sound) 
views  of  finance.  There  was  a  conference  of  free-traders 
held  in  Saratoga,  in  1877,  that  attributed  the  prevailing 
depression  to  the  interference  with  freedom  of  trade  caused 
by  the  tariff.  In  Congress  in  1878  Fernando  Wood,  of 
New  York,  brought  in  a  Democratic  measure  to  lower  the 
rates.  Among  the  junior  Republican  Congressmen  on  his 
committee  was  William  McKinley,  of  Ohio,  whose  appoint 
ment  to  the  Committee  on  Ways  and  Means  Garfield  had 
secured,  and  who  had  been  advised  by  President  Hayes  to 
study  the  tariff  and  grow  up  with  it. 

The  new  national  prosperity  was  early  shown  in  an  in 
crease  of  national  revenue.     There  was  a  Treasury  surplus 
of  $100,000,000  in  1 88 1  and  of  $145,000,000  in 
1882.     Thereafter  through  the  decade  the  sur-    prosperity 
plus  continued  in  varying  amounts,  averaging    |?  jjj? 
$104,000,000  per  year.     President  Garfield  died  ^ 
before  he  had  a  chance  to  make  to  Congress  any  recommen-  ; 


8o     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

dation  upon  the  reduction  of  the  revenue  in  order  to  lessen 
surplus  or  to  remove  the  abuses  that  were  charged  against 
it.  In  the  closing  days  of  his  campaign  the  revenue  system 
and  the  protection  which  was  a  part  of  it  showed  signs  of 
coming  back  into  politics. 

The  barren  political  debate  of  1880  was  more  significant 
after  the  Democratic  candidate,  Hancock,  expressed  him 
self  upon  the  tariff.  Speaking  at  Paterson,  New  Jersey,  on 
October  7,  in  reply  to  an  inquiry  for  his  opinion  on  the  tariff 
he  said :  "The  tariff  is  a  local  question.  The  same  question 
was  brought  up  once  in  my  native  place  in  Pennsylvania. 
It  is  a  matter  that  the  General  Government  seldom  cares  to 
interfere  with,  and  nothing  is  likely  ever  to  be  done  that  will 
interfere  with  the  industries  of  the  country."  In  the  few 
days  of  the  canvass  that  remained  the  tariff  was  much  dis 
cussed,  but  without  extensive  preparation  on  either  side. 
Much  sensitiveness  was  shown  in  manufacturing  communi 
ties.  "General  Hancock  posts  himself  for  a  political  green 
horn,"  said  the  New  York  Tribune.  "Was  there  ever  such 
twaddle  shown?  ...  [Is]  a  man  who  considers  the  tariff 
I  question  as  merely  local  ...  fit  to  become  the  first  citizen 
of  the  United  States?"  Democratic  pressure  upon  this 
theme  increased  as  Republican  irritability  was  revealed. 

Upon  recommendation  of  Arthur,   Congress  created  a 

I  tariff  commission  in  1882  to  recommend  action,  and  the  de- 

Tariff  feat  incurred  by  the  Republican  Party  in  the 

commission,  following  autumn  made  it  desirable  to  act  at 
1882 

once.  John  L.  Hayes,  the  chairman  of  the  com 
mission,  was  identified  with  the  woolen  industry  and  most 
of  his  associates  were  connected  with  other  fields  of  manu 
facture.  There  were  few  experts  available  for  appointment 
who  knew  anything  about  the  details  of  tariff  who  were  not 
identified  with  interests  affected  by  it.  The  New  York 
Herald  described  the  commission  as  "the  product  of  the 
manufacturers'  machine,  and  it  is  almost  certain  that  from 
first  to  last  it  will  dance  to  the  music  of  the  party  that '  pro 
tects'  American  labor."  The  report  of  the  commission, 
\  presented  to  Congress  in  September,  f882,  recommended  a 


REFORM  8 1 

considerable  reduction  in  tariff  rates,  and  Congress  under 
took  the  passage  of  a  general  bill  to  bring  this  about. 

'The  tariff  of  1883  was  passed  under  conditions  that 
brought  out  the  difficulties  of  passing  laws  that  affected 
business  profits.  It  was  enacted  in  the  short  ses-  Tariff  of 
slon  and  the  two  houses  worked  upon  it  simul-  l883 
taneously,  each  drafting  an  independent  bill.  The  Senate 
attached  its  draft  to  a  bill  that  had  already  passed  the 
House  of  Representatives  for  the  further  reduction  of  the 
internal  revenue.  The  need  for  a  reduction  of  the  rates  in 
order  to  lower  the  surplus  revenue  was  voiced  by  the  Ad 
ministration.  It  was  obstructed  by  the  lobbies  of  the  man 
ufacturers,  all  of  them  more  interested  in  protecting  the  prof 
its  of  their  several  businesses  than  in  making  any  scientific 
revision  of  the  tariff.  These  latter  were  aided  by  general 
arguments  that  were  advanced  defending  the  theory  of  pro 
tection  as  such.  Canada  had  in  1879  adopted  a  system  of 
protection  on  a  basis  resembling  that  of  Henry  Clay  and  his 
American  system.  The  German  tariff  of  1879  was  based 
upon  the  same  assumption. 

The  arguments  that  had  been  heard  in  the  tariff  debates 
of  the  middle  of  the  century  were  brought  back  into  the  dis 
cussion  before  the  debate  was  ended,  but  appear  to  have  had 
less  influence  than  the  representations  of  the  manufacturers. 
In  neither  party  was  there  anything  approaching  uniformity 
of  opinion,  although  the  Republicans  had  an  old  tradition 
in  favor  of  protection  as  well  as  most  of  the  manufacturers 
who  desired  it.  Randall,  of  Pennsylvania,  former  Demo 
cratic  Speaker  and  now  leader  of  the  minority,  was  as  far 
away  from  his  party  associate,  Beck,  of  Kentucky,  as  the 
Republican  "  Pig-iron  "  Kelley,  of  Pennsylvania,  was  from  his 
Republican  colleague,  Kasson,  of  Iowa.  Regardless  of  party, 
Congressmen  responded  to  the  interests  of  their  districts,  and  t 
the  tariff  that  became  a  law  in  March,  1883,  failed  to  providej^ 
the  reduction  that  Arthur  had  urged.  It  was  treasured  by 
the  Democratic  opposition  as  another  evidence  of  the  inca 
pacity  of  the  Republican  Party,  and  was  used  as  additional 
campaign  material  for  the  approaching  national  election. 


82      RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

The  political  course  of  Arthur  surprised  his  critics  if  it  did 
conciliate  them.     In  i882ieveted  a  rivers  and  harbors 


Arthur's         bill  thatwas  filledaTusuaTwTnr  "  political  pork." 

Adminis-        He  vetoed  a  Chinese  exclusion  bill   that  dis 

regarded  the  existing  treaty  with  the  Chinese 

Government.     He  approgd^a  law  in  March,  1882,  for  the 

more  vigorous  suppression  of  polygamy  in  the    Mormon 

Territory,  Utah.     The  Edmunds  Act,  which  was  directed 

at  this  condition,  disqualified  polygamists  for  office,  jury 

service,  or  the  franchise,  and  created  a  special  commission  to 

take  over  much  of  the  power  of  government  in  the  Territory 

until  this  should  be  accomplished.     The  President  startled 

/both  his  friends  and  his  critics  by  giving  genuine  support  to 

\a  bill  for  the  reform  of  the  national  civil  service. 

The  spoils  system  against  which  the  advocates  of  civil 
service  reform  directed  their  attacks,  became  entrenched  in 
Civil  serv-  the  American  Government  in  the  second  quarter 
ice  reform  of  tne  nineteenth  century.  It  was  a  device  dis 
covered  by  groups  of  politicians  working  in  the  larger  East 
ern  States  about  1825.  In  New  York  and  Pennsylvania 
political  machines  were  put  together,  cemented  by  the  use  of 
public  offices.  Party  workers  were  rewarded  by  appoint 
ments  to  office,  office-holders  were  expected  to  continue 
acting  for  the  organization,  and  looked  upon  each  election 
with  certainty  that  if  their  efforts  failed  they  could  not  hope 
to  hold  their  positions.  The  phrase  of  William  H.  Marcy, 
"to  the  victors  belong  the  spoils,"  was  an  apt  expression 
of  the  spirit  of  the  system  and  was  not  surpassed  by  Kem- 
ble's  maxim,  "addition,  division,  and  silence."  When  the 
Democratic  politicians,  who  had  turned  their  machines  to 
the  support  of  Andrew  Jackson,  came  into  control  of  the 
national  administration  in  1829,  they  renovated  the  govern 
ment  by  making  a  clean  sweep  among  the  office-holders  and 
.  rewarding  the  supporters  of  Jackson. 

For  forty  years  after  1829  few  Americans  complained  of 
the  spoils  system.  Politicians  who  lost  their  jobs  were  sore 
at  their  defeat,  but  yielded  to  the  maxim  of  Marcy  with  such 
philosophy  as  they  could  command.  Reform  for  all  parties 


REFORM  83 

was  a  thing  to  be  attained  by  turning  the  rascals  of  the  other 
party  out  of  office.  Some  politicians  were  more  adept  than 
others  in  manipulating  the  spoils,  but  few  disowned  the 
system.  Presidents  complained  of  the  waste  in  time  in 
volved  in  listening  to  office-seekers  and  their  friends.  Lin 
coln  protested  against  the  burden  in  the  months  when  the 
Union  seemed  to  be  falling  apart,  and  likened  himself  to  the 
hotel  clerk  whose  upper  floors  were  in  flames  and  who  was 
compelled  to  continue  to  rent  new  rooms  instead  of  putting 
out  the  fire;  but  for  four  years  Lincoln  used  the  offices  to 
sustain  the  Union  against  the  Confederacy. 

Little  is  heard  of  reform  in  the  civil  service  until  the  death 
of  Lincoln  threw  the  presidential  patronage  into  the  hands 
of  Andrew  Johnson.  As  a  loyal  Tennessee  War  Democrat 
Johnsooi  strengthened  the  ticket  in  1864,  when  the  Republi 
can  organization  called  itself  the  Union  Party,  and  appealed 
for  the  votes  of  all  loyalists.  Within  a  few  months  after  the 
death  of  Lincoln  political  warfare  had  been  declared  between 
Johnson  and  the  radical  majority  that  controlled  Congress, 
According  to  the  precedents  of  a  generation  the  radical 
majority,  successful  in  1864,  was  entitled  to  use  the  national 
offices  for  its  own  purposes.  Johnson's  determination  to 
use  them  in  erecting  a  presidential  machine  aroused  an  oppo 
sition  which  in  March,  1867,  passed  the  Tenure  of  Office 
Bill  over  his  veto.  The  President  was  permitted  to  suspend 
an  officer  from  service,  but  not  to  remove  him  unless  the 
Senate  concurred  in  the  removal.  The  new  law  made  it 
difficult  for  a  President  to  remove  his  enemies  from  office, 
while  the  Senate  by  its  power  to  withhold  confirmation  of 
appointments  built  up  a  system  by  which  each  Senator  in 
the  majority  party  expected  to  nominate  the  federal  officers 
appointed  within  his  state.  Johnson  fought  the  Tenure  of 
Office  Act  in  vain,  Grant  protested  against  it,  and  Hayes 
forced  the  system  into  the  open  by  his  determination  to  re 
move  Arthur  and  Cornell  against  the  will  of  Roscoe  Conk- 
ling.  A  group  of  civil  service  reformers  gained  a  hearing  for 
the  first  time,  as  they  pointed  out  the  injury  to  the  National 
Government  that  was  inflicted  whenever  an  officer  was  ap- 


84     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

pointed  for  party  reasons  instead  of  character  and  capacity. 
Thomas  A.  Jenckes,  a  Congressman  from  Rhode  Island, 
urged  the  removal  of  the  offices  from  politics  in  the  middle  of 
the  sixties,  and  the  reform  was  taken  up  by  Godkin  in  the 
New  York  Nation,  and  by  George  William  Curtis  in  Harper's 
Weekly.  The  Republican  platform  of  1868  assented  to  it 
in  theory  and  President  Grant  was  given  a  small  sum  for  the 
inauguration  of  a  merit  system. 

The  administrative  scandals  while  Grant  was  President 
gave  additional  prominence  to  the  need  for  the  reform. 
The  party  leaders  generally  opposed  it;  Conkling  sneered 

lat  it  openly  as  "snivel  service"  reform.  Their  opposition 
to  it  was  increased  when  Hayes  gave  Carl  Schurz  a  chance 
to  experiment  with  it  in  the  Indian  Bureau,  but  there  was 
no  hope  of  a  public  interest  that  would  compel  the  passage 
of  an  effective,  law  when  Hayes  left  office. 

The  murder  of  Garfield,  the  star- route  frauds,  and  the 
Democratic  victory  of  1882  on  the  platform  of  reform,  pro 
duced  a  situation  that  silenced  the  open  enemies  of  the  move 
ment  and  made  its  enactment  not  only  possible,  but  politi 
cally  necessary.  A  bill,  drawn  up  by  Senator  George  W. 

[  Pendleton,  of  Ohio,  with  the  approval  of  the  Civil  Service 
— rfkeform  Association,  became  a  law  in  January,  1883.     It 

^provided  for  a  Hen-partisan  commission  of  three,  holding 
office  for  an  indefinite  term,  with  power  to  prepare  eligible 
lists  by  examination  for  such  offices  as  might  be  turned  over 
to  the  commission. 

Dorman  B.  Eaton,  secretary  of  the  Civil  Service  Reform 
Association,  was  appointed  by  Arthur  to  inaugurate  the 
operation  of  the  law.  Some  thirteen  thousand  offices  were 
placed  in  the  classified  service  iiTtlie  first  year  of  the  com 
mission.  Under  succeeding  Presidents  the  number  was 
steadily  increased  as  well  as  its  proportion  to  the  whole 
body  of  civil  servants.  By  the  end  of  the  century  one 
hundred  thousand  offices  were  thus  safeguarded,  and  a 
decade  later,  a  quarter  of  a  million. 

The  reform  of  the  civil  service,  accomplished  because  of 
the  effect  of  notorious  scandals,  could  not  have  been  delayed 


REFORM  85 

long  after  1883.  The  new  technical  duties  assumed  by  the 
United  States  Government  were  in  need  of  trained  and 
permanent  staffs  that  had  not  been  possible  under  the  old 
system.  A  system  of  government  by  experts  was  not  yet 
in  question,  but  demands  were  being  made  upon  govern 
ment  beyond  the  capacity  of  mere  politicians. 

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL  NOTE 

Fred  E.  Haynes,  Third  Party  Movements  since  the  Civil  War  with  Special 
Reference  to  the  State  of  Iowa  (1916),  gives  a  picture  of  reform  movements 
in  the  region  where  they  were  most  numerous.  Carl  Russell  Fish,  The 
Civil  Service  and  the  Patronage  (1904),  is  the  standard  treatise  upon  its 
theme.  \V*illiam  Dudley  Foulke,  Fighting  the  Spoilsmen:  Reminiscences  of 
the  Civil  Service  Reform  Movement  (1919),  is  full  of  detail  upon  the  working 
of  reform.  James  Bryce,  The  American  Commonwealth  (1888),  was  written 
after  many  years  of  observation  and  became  a  standard  text  at  once. 
Edward  Stanwood,  American  Tariff  Controversies  in  the  Nineteenth  Century 
(1903),  is  the  work  of  a  supporter  of  the  protective  system;  F.  W.  Taussig, 
Tariff  History  of  the  United  States,  contains  in  its  successive  editions  a 
series  of  essays  upon  the  tariffs;  Ida  M.  Tarbell,  The  Tariff  in  Our  Time 
(1911).  reveals  the  personal  side  of  tariff  legislation;  many  useful  details 
and  tables  are  in  the  Report  of  the  Tariff  Commission  (1882).  More  fun 
damental  in  the  light  it  throws  upon  industrial  conditions  is  Wholesale 
Prices,  Wages,  and  Transportation:  Report  by  Mr.  Aldrich  from  the  Com 
mittee  on  Finance,  March  3,  1893;  in  52d  Cong.,  2d  Sess.,  Sen.  Rep.  1394. 


CHAPTER  IX 

THE  MUGWUMP  CAMPAIGN,  1884 

JOHN  G.  CARLISLE,  a  Democratic  Congressman  elected  from 
Kentucky  in  1876,  was  choj|BSpeaker  of  the  House  of 
Tariff  and  Representatives  when  the  Forty-Eighth  Con- 
pohtics  gress  assembled  in  December,  1883.  His  election 

followed  a  controversy  within  the  Democratic  Party  in 
which  the  rising  issue  of  th^protective  tariff  played  the  chief 
part.  His  leading  opponent,  Samuel  J.  Randall,  was  a 
protectionist  from  Pennsylvania,  and  had  been  Speaker  of 
the  Democratic  Congresses  of  the  preceding  decade,  when 
the  tariff  issue  had  been  quiescent.  The  discussions  begun 
in  1880  continued  in  the  tariff  legislation  of  1883,  and, 
stimulated  by  the  surplus  in  the  National  Treasury,  revived 
in  Southern  Democrats  their  old  antipathy  to  a  protective 
tariff.  The  fact  that  many  Republicans  desired  tariff  re 
form  added  to  the  advantage  of  organizing  a  new  Congress 
on  this  basis.  Randall  was  defeated  for  reelection,  and  with 
Carlisle  in  the  chair  the  South  came  back  into  control  of  the 
Democratic  Party.  It  was  impossible  to  pass  a  Democratic 
tariff  with  Arthur  as  President,  but  the  threat  of  one  in 
creased  the  determination  of  Northern  manufacturers  to 
secure  the  nomination  of  a  candidate  in  1884  who  could  be 
counted  upon  to  defend  the  existing  system. 

Before  either  of  the  large  national  conventions  was  held, 
Benjamin  F.  Butler  had  been  nominated  by  two  of  the 
Benjamin  minor  parties.  The  fusion  of  the  greenback  and 
F.  Butler  labor  elements  attempted  in  1878  was  not  suc 
cessful  in  bringing  the  reformers  together  or  in  establishing 
an  important  national  party.  A  growing  opposition  to 
monopoly  revived  the  hopes  of  a  third-party  protest  based 
upon  the  failure  of  the  Democratic  and  Republican  organi 
zations  to  take  necessary  action.  On  May  14,  1884,  an 
anti-monopoly  convention  met  at  Chicago  and  two  weeks 


THE  MUGWUMP  CAMPAIGN,  1884  87 

later  the  remnants  of  the  National  Greenback-Labor  Party 
convened  at  Indianapolis.  The  political  poverty  of  the 
movement  was  shown  by  the  nomination  of  Butler  by  both 
organizations. 

"  Ben"  Butler  aroused  much  stormy  difference  of  opinion 
throughout  his  political  career.  A  prominent  Democratic 
lawyer  in  Boston  before  the  Civil  War,  he  became  a  politi 
cal  major-general,  whose  service  in  command  of  troops  in 
Virginia  was  regarded  as  grossly  incompetent.  His  career 
at  New  Orleans  established  order  there,  but  was  noto 
rious.  Doubts  as  to  his  honesty  were  widespread  and  were 
strengthened  by  a  brusqueness  in  his  manner  and  the  cyni 
cal  opinions  constantly  attributed  to  him.  As  a  member  of 
Congress  he  expressed  an  open  contempt  for  measures  of 
reform,  and  when  the  better  H^mpntc  of  society  turned 
against  him,  he  declared  himself  the  friend  of  the  working- 
man.  He  struggled  repeatedly  for  the  governorship  of 
Massachusetts,  and  was  victorious  in  the  election  of  1882,  in 
which  the  Republican  Party  was  disrupted  everywhere.  As 
governor  of  Massachusetts  his  notoriety  was  increased  by 
the  refusal  of  Harvard  College  to  confer  upon  him  the  hon 
orary  degree  that  it  usually  bestowed  upon  governors  of  the 
State.  Having  left  the  Republican  Party  on  the  charge 
that  it  was  faithless  to  the  common  citizen,  and  having 
suffered  indignity  from  the  intellectuals  of  his  own  State, 
he  entered  the  canvass  for  the  Democratic  nomination  as 
President  on  the  issue  of  reform.  He  had  earlier  expressed 
his  attitude  upon  the  way  to  seek  office:  not  as  a  maiden 
coyly  and  reluctantly,  but  as  a  widow  who  knows  her  own 
mind;  and  as  "the  widow"  in  politics  Butler  figured  in  the 
cartoons  of  his  day.  He  invited  the  early  nominations  that 
he  received  from  the  smaller  parties,  but  withheld  accept 
ance  of  them,  hoping  to  secure  their  endorsement  from  the 
Democratic  Party. 

The  strongest  Republican  candidate  for  the  nomination 
was  James  G.  Blaine,  who  had  a  wider  influ-    james  G. 
ence  than  any  other  leader  of  his  party,  and  who    Blaine 
was  not  opposed  by  any  personality  of  great  importance. 


88     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

President  Arthur  desired  renomination  and  had  support 
from  the  professional  office-holding  class ;  and  deserved  still 
more  because  of  the  character  of  his  administration.  John 
Sherman  was  still  hopeful  of  receiving  the  distinction,  but 
neither  of  these  possessed  the  magnetism  of  Elaine,  nor  the 
power  to  interest  Americans  en  masse. 

In  his  twenty  years  of  political  life  Elaine  had  identified 
himself  with  the  major  issues  that  his  party  supported, 
without  originating  them.  He  entered  Congress  at  the  be 
ginning  of  the  Civil  War,  and  established  a  power  of  parlia 
mentary  leadership  that  made  him  Speaker  and  kept  him 
in  that  post  for  six  years.  His  charm  of  manner  made 
him  personal  friends  and  he  cultivated  the  politician's  gift 
of  recognizing  them  on  sight.  Always  an  eloquent  speaker, 
he  was  most  successful  upon  themes  arising  from  the  Civil 
War.  His  short  service  as  Secretary  of  State  under  Gar- 
field  was  long  enough  for  him  to  show  a  deliberate  policy, 
jingoistic  in  part,  but  including  the  constructive  notion  of 
cooperation  among  the  Americas.  After  1881  he  lived  gen 
erally  in  Washington,  working  upon  his  Twenty  Years  of 
Congress  (1884)  and  strengthening  his  hold  upon  the  Re 
publican  Party  as  one  who  could  bring  back  the  glories  of 
the  past. 

Among  the  special  qualifications  of  Elaine  was  the  fact 
that  he  had  many  friends  and  followers  in  a  racial  group 
The  Irish  that  was  usually  Democratic  —  the  Irish  voters, 
vote  The  Irish  came  into  America  in  sufficient  num 

bers  to  affect  the  balance  of  palrties  during  the  Mexican 
War  and  later.  Their  tendency  to  settle  in  the  cities 
brought  them  within  reach  of  the  overtures  of  city  bosses 
who  controlled  the  local  Democratic  machines,  and  their 
natural  gift  for  party  manipulation  made  them  active  work 
ers  from  the  start.  A  generation  after  the  first  wave  of  the 
Irish  came,  a  second  emigration  was  started,  stimulated  by 
the  agricultural  depression  that  prevailed  in  England  and 
Ireland  about  1879.  The  new  Irish  immigrants  like  the 
older  filled  the  Eastern  cities  and  brought  to  the  United 
States  a  vigorous  dislike  for  their  mother  country. 


THE  MUGWUMP  CAMPAIGN,  1884  89 

In  all  the  Irish  immigration  poverty  and  suffering  at 
home  acted  as  a  stimulus.  Non-resident  ownership  of  their 
farms  by  English  landlords  was  a  constant  provocative  of 
misunderstanding  and  hard  feeling.  In  1879  the  Irish 
Land  Leagye  was  organized  by  Michael  Davitt,  Charles 
Stewart  Parnell,  and  their  associates  to  fight  the  absentee 
landlord  in  the  interest  of  an  Irish  ownership  of  Ireland. 
The  movement  aroused  bitterness  in  England  and  fear 
among  those  whose  property  was  threatened,  but  in  the 
United  States  it  was  welcomed  by  Irish-Americans  many  of 
whom  were  both  able  and  willing  to  help  the  cause.  Parnell 
was  in  the  United  States  in  1880  raising  funds  for  the  Land 
League,  and  was  welcomed  not  only  by  the  Irish,  but  also 
by  American  politicians  who  either  sympathized  with  the 
Irish  protest  or  desired  the  Irish  vote.  Elaine  was  one  of 
the  few  Republican  leaders  to  attract  the  Irish.  The  fact 
that  his  mother  was  an  Irish  Catholic  was  widely  adver 
tised.  As  Secretary  of  State  he  was  sufficiently  anti-British 
to  interest  the  Irish,  and  he  gave  them  special  grounds  for 
support  by  his  vigor  in  working  to  get  out  of  jail  in  Ireland 
those  Irish-Americans  who  had  returned  to  the  old  country 
to  agitate  in  favor  of  the  Land  League.  "The  feeling  is 
gaining  ground  in  this  country  that  Ireland  is  one  of  the 
United  States,"  said  the  New  York  Tribune  in  1882.  The 
Chicago  Inter-Ocean  had  already  remarked  that  "this  is  the 
political  bummers'  chance." 

After  the  passage  of  the  Coercion  Act  in  March,  1881,  the 
Irish  Land  League  was  broken  up  in  Ireland,  and  the  aim 
of  the  movement  was  shifted  to  home  rule.  The  murder 
of  Cavendish  and  Burke  in  the  following  year,  and  the 
prominence  of  the  dynamiters  among  the  Irish,  advertised 
the  movement  still  further.  In  April,  1883,  a  great  con 
vention  was  held  in  Philadelphia  on  the  call  of  the  Irish 
National  League.  Patrick  Egan,  of  Dublin,  former  treas 
urer  of  the  Land  League,  who  had  been  spirited  out  of  Ire 
land,  made  his  first  American  appearance  on  this  occasion, 
and  Democratic  leaders  welcomed  the  opportunity  to  ad 
dress  the  body. 


90      RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

The  organization  attained  by  the  Irish- Americans  for 
their  own  sentimental  and  reminiscent  purposes  was  a 
continuous  temptation  to  American  politicians  to  seize  it 
for  party  purposes;  and  Elaine's  special  hold  upon  the  Irish 
might  have  secured  his  nomination  without  any  opposition 
had  it  not  been  for  the  objection  of  a  group  of  independent 
Republicans  desirous  of  reform,  but  distrusting  him  as  its 
agent. 

Twice  before  1884  Elaine  had  almost  had  his  fingers  upon 
the  coveted  nomination.  In  1876,  while  he  was  a  leading 
The  candidate,  rumors  were  heard  in  Washington 

Mulligan  that  damaging  letters  existed  that  would  destroy 

letters  .,  .       ,  ...         11-11        ^ 

his  character  if  published.  On  April  24  he  de 
nounced  certain  of  the  charges  that  connected  him  with  the 
improper  ownership  of  railroad  bonds,  and^is  friends  be 
lieved  that  he  had  silenced  them;  but  the  stories  continued, 
and  it  became  known  that  a  man  named  Mulligan  had  come 
into  possession  of  incriminating  letters.  Elaine  visited 
Mulligan  at  his  hotel,  took  the  letters  from  him,  and  on 
June  5  read  them  in  the  House,  interpreting  as  he  went 
along.  His  spirit  and  courage  won  for  him  an  immediate 
parliamentary  victory  over  the  forces  of  detraction,  but  five 
days  later  he  was  overcome  by  a  sunstroke,  and  when  the 
Republican  Convention  met  he  was  in  no  physical  condition 
to  be  nonvnated  for  the  presidency. 

Much  of  the  opposition  to  Elaine  in  1880  was  founded 
upon  the  belief  that  the  Mulligan  letters  revealed  miscon 
duct  on  his  part.  Elaine  confessed  they  revealed  poverty 
and  an  attempt  to  eke  out  his  income  by  a  sale  of  railroad 
securities  on  a  commission  basis.  The  charge  that  \vas  most 
difficult  to  explain  away  was  that  Elaine,  while  Speaker  in 
1869,  and  presiding  over  a  debate  upon  a  land  grant  for  the 
Little  Rock  and  Fort  Smith  Railroad,  had  shown  the  pro 
moters  of  that  land  grant  how  to  save  their  measure  from 
defeat  in  Congress.  The  Congressional  Globe  and  the  testi 
mony  presented  established  the  fact  of  this  assistance.  A 
few  days  later,  as  one  of  the  Mulligan  letters  revealed, 
Elaine  was  writing  to  one  Fisher,  who  was  interested  in  this 


THE  MUGWUMP  CAMPAIGN,  1884  91 

transaction,  asking  to  be  admitted  to  the  enterprise  and 
promising  that  he  would  not  prove  a  " deadhead"  in  the 
business.  Subsequently  Elaine  obtained  a  contract  for 
selling  securities  of  this  railroad  upon  profitable  terms. 
The  other  letters  showed  that  the  venture  was  not  success 
ful,  and  that  hard  feeling  was  developed  not  only  among  the 
speculators,  but  also  among  those  constituents  of  Elaine 
who  bought  the  securities  upon  his  recommendation.  It 
was  not  shown  that  he  had  been  bribed  to  perform  any 
public  act,  but  it  was  clear  that  he  had  asked  to  be  re 
warded  by  the  beneficiaries  of  his  official  conduct,  and  that 
he  had  been  willing  while  Speaker  to  trade  upon  the  prestige 
of  his  office.  He  was  at  least  dangerously  near  the  margin 
of  public  honesty,  and  when  the  demand  for  a  higher  stand 
ard  of  public  conduct  was  created  by  the  scandals  of  the 
early  seventies,  he  was  never  able  to  square  his  former 
practice  with  the  new  code. 

As  it  became  clear  in  1884  that  Elaine  was  the  strongest 
candidate  for  the  Republican  nomination,  the  group  of  in 
dependent  Republicans  revived  their  hostility  to 

,  .  11.11  1  t  Mugwumps 

him  and  let  it  be  known  that  he  could  not  re 
ceive  the  support  of  the  whole  party.     They  were  described 
by  machine  leaders  as  "parlor  and  clear  election-day  Re 
publicans,"  and  were  given  the  nickname  "Mugwumps,"*^ 
for  which  the  New  York  Sun  provided  an  Indian  etymology, 
translating  the  term  as  "big  bug,  or  swell  head."     Theii 
"holier  than  thou"  attitude  was  denounced  by  politicians 
with  whose  plans  they  interfered,  but  in  New  York  and  New 
England  they  had  a  strong  influence  over  the  selection  of 
the  party  delegates  to  the  convention  at  Chicago. 

Henry  Cabot  Lodge,  of  Massachusetts,  and  Theodore 
Roosevelt,  of  New  York,  made  their  initial  national  appear 
ance  as  leaders  of  this  movement  against  the  nomination  of 
Elaine.  Lodge,  fresh  from  his  studies  at  Harvard  College 
where  he  had  lectured  on  history  for  several  years  in  the 
later  seventies,  was  acclaimed  as  an  early  instance  of  a  new 
phenomenon,  the  scholar  in  politics.  Roosevelt  had  com 
pleted  three  sessions  of  the  New  York  Assembly,  and  though 


92     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

not  yet  twenty-six^  years  of  age,  had  made  himself  a  leader 
of  the  party  delegation.  Harper's  Weekly  came  to  the  sup 
port  of  the  Mugwump  protest.  The  Nation  aided  it,  and 
a  large  number  of  Republican  newspapers  showed  a  dispo 
sition  to  sympathize  with  it. 

When  the  Republican  Convention  met  in  Chicago  on 
June  3,  1884,  it  was  clear  that  a  nomination  of  Elaine  would 
Republican  probably  be  followed  by  some  kind  of  party 
Convention  disaffection.  The  opposing  forces  were  strong 
enough  to  secure  the  election  of  their  own  temporary  chair 
man,  but  were  not  able  to  merge  their  strength  on  any 
single  candidate.  The  choice  of  the  Mugwumps,  Senator 
George  F.  Edmunds,  of  Vermont,  was  not  a  candidate  to 
inspire  personal  enthusiasm  even  among  his  friends,  and 
was  described  as  the  "presidential  glacier"  by  his  op 
ponents.  Elaine  was  nominated  in  spite  of  the  continued 
opposition  of  the  independents  and  received,  as  his  com 
panion  on  the  ticket,  General  John  A.  Logan,  a  Grant  sup 
porter  of  1880,  who  was  supposed  to  have  the  same  hold  on 
the  Grand  Army  of  the  Republic  that  Elaine  had  held  over 
the  Irish  vote. 

The  defeated  opponents  of  Elaine  were  forced  to  choose 
between  leaving  the  party  and  supporting  a  candidate 
whom  they  believed  to  be  unworthy.  Roosevelt  and 
Lodge  took  the  latter  course,  the  others,  led  by  Horace 
White  and  George  W.  Curtis,  returned  to  New  York,  dis 
cussing  plans  for  a  party  schism,  and  held  conferences 
within  the  next  few  days  upon  the  best  way  to  beat  Elaine. 
The  simplest  method  was  to  induce  the  Democratic  Party, 
whose  convention  would  be  held  on  July  8,  to  nominate  a 
candidate  whom  they  could  support  as  an  honest  man  and 
a  genuine  reformer.  Their  attention  had  already  been 
drawn  to  Governor  Grover  Cleveland,  of  New  York. 

Grover  Cleveland,  a  middle-aged  country  lawyer,  emerged 
from  civic  obscurity  when  he  was  elected  as  mayor  of  Buf- 
Grover  falo  in  1 88 1  upon  a  reform  ticket.  A  year  later, 

Cleveland  when  the  Democratic  Party  needed  a  suitable 
candidate  to  oppose  Secretary  of  the  Treasury  Folger,  the 


THE  MUGWUMP  CAMPAIGN,  1884  93 

leaders  induced  the  convention  to  accept  Cleveland  as  a 
candidate  for  governor.  He  won  by  "a  surprisingly  large 
majority,  and  made  civil  service  reform  a  chief  issue  in  the 
campaign  and  acted  upon  it  after  his  election.  As  governor 
he  aroused  the  hostility  of  the  Tammany  Democrats  in 
New  York  City  by  his  refusal  to  be  a  machine  man  and  by 
supporting  non-partisan  measures  for  municipal  govern 
ment.  His  fighting  qualities  and  his  slow,  stubborn  sin 
cerity  gained  him  immediate  rank  as  a  leader  in  a  party 
that  had  developed  few  national  figures  since  the  Civil  War. 
The  Mugwumps  intimated  that  they  would  support  him  if 
nominated,  and  thus  influenced  the  Democratic  nomination, 
since  that  party  was  willing  to  nominate  anybody  to  win. 
The  Tammany  delegates  protested  in  vain  against  the  nom 
ination,  giving  point  to  the  rejoinder  of  General  Bragg,  who 
declared  that  "we  love  him  for  the  enemies  he  has  made." 
He  was  nominated  for  the  presidency,  with  Hendricks  for 
the  vice-presidency. 

The  canvass  of  1884  was  one  of  personality  rather  than 
one  of  principle.  Neither  platform  made  an  issue  of  any 
single  theme.  Republicans  still  harped  on  the  The  canvass 
untrustworthiness  of  Democrats,  and  Democrats  of  I884 
pledged  themselves  to  all  measures  of  reform  that  might 
embarrass  Republicans.  The  Republican  platform  state 
ment  on  the  tariff  was  less  emphatic  than  the  determination 
of  party  leaders  to  maintain  the  system.  The  civil  service 
legislation  of  1883  had  lessened  the  value  of  public  offices 
as  a  means  of  cementing  party  organization,  and  had  made 
it  difficult  to  raise  party  funds  by  the  old  methods  of  as 
sessment  upon  office-holders.  The  campaign  fund  of  1884 
was  sought  from  manufacturers  who  were  interested  in 
maintaining  the  tariff  without  any  change  or  in  rearranging 
the  rates.  B.  F.  Jones,  of  Pittsburgh,  a  steel  manufacturer 
and  a  friend  of  Blaine,  was  made  chairman  of  the  Republi 
can  National  Committee  to  direct  the  fight. 

The  Mugwump  attack  upon  the  political  character  of 
Blaine  encouraged  Republican  party  organs  to  search  for 
something  discreditable  in  the  character  of  Cleveland.  To- 


94     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

ward  the  end  of  July  they  found  it  in  improper  relations 
maintained  eight  years  earlier  with  a  Buffalo  woman,  and 
immediately  they  described  him.  "as  a  notorious  libertine 
and  profligate."  Democratic  journals  rejoined  with  at 
tacks  upon  the  correctness  of  Elaine's  marriage,  but  were 
silenced  by  Elaine's  statement  of  facts  and  Gteveland's 
refusal  to  countenance  their  move.  The  personalities  of 
the  campaign  became  more  disgraceful  as  the  canvass  ad 
vanced,  and  increased  the  number  of  voters  dissatisfied  with 
either  candidate. 

Butler  accepted  the  third-party  nominations  after  Cleve 
land  had  been  chosen  by  the  Democrats,  and  carried  on  his 
candidacy  with  the  New  York  Sun  as  his  chief  supporter. 
It  was  openly  charged  that  the  Republican  Party  was  pay 
ing  the  expenses  of  his  campaign,  in  order  to  detach  votes 
from  Cleveland.  Republicans,  on  the  other  hand,  unwill 
ing  to  support  Elaine  and  unable  to  vote  for  Cleveland, 
showed  a  willingness  to  throw  their  votes  away  upon  ex- 
Governor  St.  John  of  Kansas,  whom  the  Prohibition  Party 
nominated  on  July  23.  St.  John  was  denounced  as  a  "stool- 
pigeon,"  whose  canvass  was  intended  to  weaken  Elaine. 

A  few  days  before  the  election  the  supporters  of  Elaine 
arranged  for  a  meeting  of  clergymen  at  the  Fifth  Avenue 
Hotel  to  endorse  the  character  of  the  Republican  candidate. 
The  senior  member  of  the  group,  a  Catholic  priest,  who  had 
been  expected  to  make  the  address,  failed  to  appear,  and 
a  Protestant  clergyman  named  Burchard  took  his  place. 
Elaine,  tired  by  the  campaign  and  thinking  over  his  speech 
in  reply,  failed  to  follow  the  speaker  or  to  notice  when  he 
described  contemptuously  the  Democratic  Party  as  the  sup 
porters  of  "rum,  Romanism,  and  rebellion."  "I  am  the 
last  man  in  the  United  States  who  would  make  a  disrespect 
ful  allusion  to  another  man's  religion,"  Elaine  declared,  when 
the  evil  was  done  and  it  was  too  late  to  stop  it.  The  Demo 
cratic  papers  spread  the  phrase  "rum,  Romanism,  and  re 
bellion"  broadcast;  some  even  put  the  words  into  Elaine's 
own  mouth  in  spite  of  his  denial  and  Burchard's  abject  con 
trition.  It  is  impossible  to  say  how  far  the  Irish  vote  upon 


THE  MUGWUMP  CAMPAIGN,  1884  95 

which  Elaine  counted  was  repelled  by  the  apparent  insult. 
When  the  ballots  were  finally  counted,  Cleveland  and 
Hendricks  were  elected  by  a  plurality  of  23,000  over  Elaine 
and  Logan;  though  with  a  minority  of  all  the  votes  cast. 
The  small  pluralities  by  which  Cleveland  carried  various 
Irish  precincts  in  New  York  gave  plausibility  to  the  asser 
tion  that  Elaine  might  well  have  been  elected  had  there 
been  no  Burchard  episode. 

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL  NOTE 

Harrison  C.  Thomas,  The  Return  of  the  Democratic  Party  to  Power  in  1884 
(1919),  is  founded  upon  a  careful  study  of  the  available  sources.  It  should 
be  supplemented  by  the  biographies  of  Blaine  by  Gail  Hamilton  and 
Edward  Stamvood,  and  the  brilliant  essay  by  Gamaliel  Bradford  in  the 
Atlantic  Monthly  (1920).  The  antecedents  of  the  Mugwump  movement 
are  carefully  traced  in  Earle  D.  Ross,  The  Liberal  Republican  Movement 
(1919).  The  lack  of  an  authoritative  biography  of  Cleveland  will  shortly 
be  filled  by  an  official  biography  now  in  preparation  by  Robert  M. 
McElroy.  G.  F.  Parker,  Recollections  of  Graver  Cleveland  (1909),  and 
Richard  Watson  Gilder,  Grover  Cleveland,  A  Record  of  Friendship  (1910), 
are  of  considerable  value.  William  C.  Hudson,  Random  Recollections  of 
an  Old  Political  Reporter  (1911),  contains  interesting  gossip  on  this  cam 
paign.  Harry  Thurston  Peck,  Twenty  Years  of  the  Republic  (1907),  be 
gins  its  narrative  with  the  Cleveland  Administration. 


CHAPTER  X 
THE  NATIONAL  ESTATE 

AFTER  a  period  of  twenty-four  years  in  opposition,  the 
Democratic  Party  returned  to  only  partial  control  of  the 
Government  in  1885.  Its  President  was  a  Northern  Demo 
crat,  selected  because  of  his  ability  to  widen  the  schism  in 
the  Republican  Party.  The  House  of  Representatives  was 
under  the  control  of  Southern  Democrats,  who  reflected 
John  G.  Carlisle  as  Speaker  when  Congress  reassembled  in 
December.  The  Senate  remained  Republican  throughout 
the  administration,  making  it  impossible  for  party  legisla 
tion  to  be  enacted,  but  favoring  somewhat  the  passage  of 
non-partisan  laws  that  had  to  do  with  the  management  of 
the  national  estate. 

The  Cabinet  of  Cleveland  had  at  its  head  Thomas  F. 
Bayard,  of  Delaware,  a  Senator  since  1869,  who  had  been 
Cleveland's  a  candidate  for  the  presidential  nomination  in 
Cabinet  l88o  anj  jgg^  pjis  father  had  preceded  him 
in  the  Senate,  and  his  family  had  been  famous  in  the 
State  and  National  administrations  since  independence. 
Under  his  direction  the  United  States  withdrew  from  the 
aggressive  attitude  assumed  by  Elaine  with  respect  to  the 
isthmian  canal,  and  accepted  the  status  of  joint  interest 
as  agreed  upon  in  the  Clayton-Bulwer  Treaty.  The  re 
maining  members  of  the  Cabinet  were  untested  leaders, 
necessarily  so,  since  their  party  had  been  so  long  in  oppo 
sition.  Daniel  Manning,  Secretary  of  the  Treasury,  was  a 
New  York  journalist.  William  C.  Whitney,  Secretary  of 
the  Navy,  was  a  New  York  anti-Tammany  lawyer  and 
son-in-law  of  Senator  Payne,  a  Standard  Oil  magnate  from 
Ohio.  Lamar,  the  Secretary  of  the  Interior,  and  Gar 
land,  the  Attorney-General,  had  been  Confederate  officers. 
William  F.  Vilas,  of  Wisconsin,  whose  oration  at  a  reunion 
of  the  Army  of  the  Tennessee  had  made  him  a  leading  mem- 


THE  NATIONAL  ESTATE  97 

her  of  his  party,  was  made  Postmaster-General.  There  was 
nothing  in  the  personnel  of  the  Cabinet  to  give  a  clue  as  to 
what  its  policies  would  be. 

The  Republican  campaign  charges  of  disloyalty  in  the 
Democratic  Party  had  included  repeated  assertions  that 
the  Democratic  Party  proposed  to  vote  national  civil  War 
pensions  for  Confederate  veterans  who  had  tried  Pensions 
to  break  the  Union.  The  votes  of  former  Union  soldiers 
were  asked  to  prevent  such  treason,  and  to  make  possible 
continued  generous  treatment  of  the  loyal  veterans.  The 
attitude  of  the  Cleveland  Administration  with  reference  to 
pensions  was  watched  for  signs  of  hostility  to  the  men  who 
saved  the  Union.  Cleveland's  record  as  a  candidate  had 
been  seriously  attacked  because  he  had  not  enlisted  in  the 
Civil  War,  although  of  military  age,  but  this  attack  had 
been  weakened  by  the  fact  that  Elaine  of  similar  age  was 
equally  without  a  military  record.  The  Grand  Army  of  the 
Republic,  which  was  formed  in  April,  1866,  at  Springfield, 
Illinois,  now  became  the  official  representative  of  the  vet 
erans  of  the  Civil  War.  Its  growth  had  been  slow  for  a 
decade,  until  after  Congress  passed  an  arrears  of  pensions 
bill  in  1879. 

The  military  pension  system  of  the  United  States  was 
founded  upon  the  principle  that  disability  incurred  in  the 
service  entitled  the  veteran  to  a  pension  from  the  Govern 
ment.  The  number  of  pensioners  after  the  Civil  War 
reached  a  total  of  242,755  by  1879.  In  this  year  Hayes 
against  his  better  judgment  signed  a  law  providing  that 
every  pensioner  was  entitled  to  receive  his  annuity  not  from 
the  date  of  the  award,  but  from  the  date  of  mustering  out. 
Every  pensioner  on  the  rolls  thus  became  entitled  to  re 
ceive  arrears  of  pension  to  cover  the  interval  between  his 
discharge  and  the  beginning  of  regular  payment,  running 
to  a  total  of  hundreds  or  even  thousands  of  dollars  in  in 
dividual  cases.  The  financial  effect  of  this  law  had  not  even 
been  estimated  at  the  date  of  its  passage.  In  addition  to 
the  back  payments  entailed,  new  pensioners  appeared  upon 
the  rolls  in  large  numbers,  tempted  by  the  heavy  and  in- 


98     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

creasing  bonus  of  arrears.  Pension  attorneys,  who  secured 
the  affidavits  and  prepared  the  papers,  charged  extortionate 
fees  against  the  arrears,  and  were  incited  to  hunt  out  possi 
ble  pensioners  and  induce  them  to  file  their  claims.  Some 
of  the  firms  of  attorneys  published  private  newspapers  for 
propaganda  work  among  the  soldiers,  and  all  of  them  en 
couraged  the  expansion  and  development  of  the  Grand 
Army  of  the  Republic,  which  was  not  for  them  a  patriotic 
order,  but  a  machine  for  detecting  the  presence  of  new  pen 
sioners  and  for  bringing  political  pressure  in  favor  of  even 
greater  liberality.  For  its  members  the  Grand  Army  was 
a  patriotic  and  devotional  society;  the  claims  attorneys 
used  it  to  increase  their  profits.  The  membership  of  the 
Grand  Army  grew  rapidly  after  1879.  Corporal  James 
Tanner  became  its  commander  in  1882,  and  a  campaign  was 
started  for  the  passage  of  a  new  general  law  for  the  payment 
of  pensions  based  not  upon  disability  in  the  service,  but 
upon  subsequent  disability  or  upon  service  alone.  A  de 
pendents'  pension  bill  vetoed  by  Cleveland  in  1887  brought 
him  under  the  displeasure  of  the  promoters  of  such  legis 
lation. 

The  private  pension  bill  was  a  greater  abuse  than  the 
general  legislation  because  in  hundreds  of  cases  individuals 
not  entitled  to  pension  by  any  general  rule  obtained  the 
friendly  intervention  of  their  Congressmen  to  secure  the 
favor  by  direct  special  legislation.  The  private  bills  in 
cluded  cases  of  deserters  with  the  effrontery  to  seek  aid 
from  the  country  they  had  betrayed ;  and  trumped-up  cases, 
where  the  evidence  frequently  showed  reasons  why  the  pen 
sion  should  not  be  granted.  Many  of  them  covered  cases 
that  had  been  disallowed  by  the  Commissioner  of  Pensions 
for  cause.  Cleveland  was  the  first  President  to  examine 
Jthe  private  pension  bills  critically  and  to  veto  those  that 
were  unworthy.  Toward  the  end  of  his  Administration  he 
vetoed  them  by  the  score,  arousing  professed  indignation 
among  Republicans,  who  claimed  that  the  vetoes  revealed 
lack  of  interest  in  the  soldier.  The  Republican  Party 
pledged  itself  to  more  generous  treatment,  and  redeemed 


THE  NATIONAL  ESTATE  99 

the  promise,  after  Harrison  had  made  Corporal  Tanner 
Commissioner  of  Pensions,  by  passing  a  dependents'  pen 
sion  law  in  1890. 

The  willingness  of  Cleveland  to  perform  ungracious  acts 
of  public  honesty  led  him  to  undertake  a  reform  of  the  ad 
ministration  of  the  General  Land  Office,  which  Public  land 
had  been  wide  open  since  the  passage  of  the  frauds 
Homestead  Law,  and  which  had  been  administered  "to 
the  advantage  of  speculation  and  monopoly,  private  and 
corporate,  rather  than  in  the  public  interest."  "  I  am  satis 
fied,"  said  Sparks,  the  Commissioner  of  the  Land  Office, 
"that  thousands  of  claims  without  foundation  in  law  or 
equity,  involving  millions  of  acres  of  public  land,  had  been 
annually  passed  to  patent  upon  the  single  proposition  that 
nobody  but  the  Government  had  any  adverse  interests." 
"Cleveland  seems  determined  that  the  rich  shall  obey  the 
laws  as  well  as  the  poor,"  said  the  Idaho  Avalanche. 

The  national  estate  of  the  United  States  came  into  ex 
istence  when  the  original  States  ceded  their  surplus  lands 
to  Congress  to  be  used  for  the  benefit  of  the  Union  and  for 
the  creation  of  additional  States.  Subsequent  purchases 
added  to  the  area  of  the  public  domain  thus  created.  With 
the  exception  of  the  thirteen  original  States  and  the  first 
three  to  be  admitted,  Vermont,  Kentucky,  and  Tennessee, 
and  West  Virginia  and  Texas,  making  eighteen  in  all,  the 
United  States  itself  provided  the  land  upon  which  its  com 
monwealths  were  erected.  In  disposing  of  the  land  to  in 
dividual  owners,  two  general  policies  prevailed;  the  ear 
lier,  a  tidewater  policy,  framed  under  the  dominance  of  the 
original  States,  offered  lands  for  sale  and  assumed  that  there 
would  be  profits  accruing  from  the  process  to  be  used  for 
national  advantage. 

In  1841  the  West  itself  became  the  controlling  element 
in  land  distribution,  marking  its  arrival  by  the  passage  of 
a  general  preemption  law  that  recognized  that  the  settler 
who  made  a  farm  out  of  virgin  land  was  a  public  benefactor 
entitled  to  a  reward.  Squatters  who  were  found  in  residence 
when  any  tract  of  public  land  was  placed  on  the  market 


ioo     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

were  allowed  to  buy  their  land  at  a  minimum  price  in  ad 
vance  of  the  public  auction  sale.  The  West  continued  to 
ask  for  still  more  liberal  treatment  of  the  settler,  and  in 
1862  Congress  accepted  the  principle  of  the  Homestead 
Act,  whereby  the  citizen  who  made  his  farm  and  lived  upon 
it  for  a  term  of  years  was  given  title  to  it  free  of  charge. 

The  Homestead  Law  drew  the  attention  of  all  the 
world  to  the  free  lands  of  the  West,  while  the  continental 
railroads,  constructed  after  the  Civil  War,  made  them 
easily  accessible.  The  rush  of  population  swamped  the 
General  Land  Office,  as  it  did  the  Post-Office,  and  both 
broke  down,  partly  through  fraud  and  partly  through  the 
lack  of  an  intelligent  civil  service.  Abuses  in  the  land 
system  were  noted  in  the  three  administrations  preceding 
Cleveland's,  and  became  more  imposing  as  the  area  of  free 
land  dwindled  around  1885. 

The  principal  abuses  that  needed  to  be  corrected  in 
cluded  frauds  in  the  homestead  system,  fraudulent  pre 
emption,  theft  of  public  land  by  illegal  enclosures,  theft  of 
the  natural  resources,  timber  or  mineral,  and  the  fraudu 
lent  attempts  of  railroads  to  secure  their  land  grants  with 
out  complying  with  the  terms  of  the  award. 

The  theory  of  the  land  laws  was  that  the  lands  were  to 
be  disposed  of  in  small  tracts  for  immediate  occupancy  and 
cultivation.  Everything  was  done  to  make  it  difficult  to 
acquire  land  for  speculative  purposes  or  to  build  up  large 
holdings.  The  system  worked  well  in  farming  regions  in 
the  Mississippi  Valley,  but  on  the  Western  plains,  where 
large  areas  were  without  sufficient  rainfall,  it  made  no  pro 
vision  for  the  only  way  in  which  the  lands  could  be  used. 
Here  the  lands  were  needed  in  large  tracts  for  grazing  and 
timber  purposes  and  could  not  well  be  used  in  section  tracts 
or  less. 

The  Homestead  and  Preemption  Laws  were  repeatedly 
violated  in  the  interest  of  persons  who  were  building  up  large 
estates  on  the  public  domain.  Sparks,  the  new  Commis 
sioner  of  the  General  Land  Office,  took  office  toward  the 
end**of  March,  1885,  and  a  few  days  later  began  his  attack 


THE  NATIONAL  ESTATE  101 

upon  fraudulent  and  collusive  entries  by  suspending  final 
action  upon  any  of  the  Western  entries  until  the  cases  could 
be  reexamined.  Every  entry  on  the  public  domain  was 
founded  upon  local  testimony  and  filed  at  a  local  office, 
where  it  was  possible  that  the  local  agents  might  be  in 
collusion  with  fraud.  Only  by  means  of  inspection  directed 
from  Washington  could  these  frauds  be  detected.  The 
affidavits  showing  that  entries  had  been  cultivated  needed 
to  be  checked  up  by  inspection  to  determine  whether  this 
was  a  fact.  Proof  that  residences  had  been  built  needed 
to  be  cross-examined.  In  more  than  one  case  the  entry- 
men  of  four  adjacent  quarter  sections  erected  one  small 
and  temporary  sod  house  over  the  common  corner  of  the 
four  sections,  after  which  each  entryman  separately  swore 
to  the  existence  of  a  dwelling  upon  his  section. 

The  Homestead  Law  permitted  the  entryman,  who  did 
not  desire  to  serve  out  the  required  period  of  residence,  to 
commute  his  entry  and  purchase  the  land  on  the  basis  of  pre 
emption.  In  a  multitude  of  cases  these  commuted  entries 
were  made  at  the  earliest  legal  date,  and  local  deed  books 
showed  that  adjacent  sections  were  all  immediately  trans 
ferred  to  a  single  holder,  who  thus  became  the  owner  of  a 
greater  acreage  than  the  law  permitted.  It  was  common 
gossip  on  the  plains  that  new  employees  on  the  ranches  were 
induced  to  file  homestead  or  preemption  claims  on  ad 
joining  territory,  and  sell  the  claim  to  the  owner.  This 
sort  of  collusive  work  constituted  a 'fraud  upon  the  Govern 
ment  which  'could  not  be  detected  except  by  inspection. 
The  number  of  inspectors  authorized  by  law  was  so  small 
that  the  order  of  Sparks,  holding  up  the  final  passage  of 
claims  until  they  were  examined,  filled  the  office  with 
thousands  of  pending  cases.  The  protests  of  honest  entry- 
men  against  this  proceeding  were  mingled  with  those  of  the 
land  robbers,  whose  work  was  interfered  with. 

The  illegal  enclosure  of  public  lands  involved  nearly 
five  million  acres  of  known  cases  before  Cleveland  became 
President.  In  February,  1885,  Arthur  signed  a  law  for  the 
removal  of  fences  from  the  public  domain.  In  some  cases 


102     RECENT  .HISTORY  .OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

tracts  of  several  thousand  acres  were  enclosed  in  wire  fences 
by  the  cattle-men  without  a  shadow  of  legal  title.  In  other 
instances  the  encloser  would  acquire  title  to  a  string  of 
sections  through  which  passed  a  stream  suitable  for  pur 
poses  of  stock-watering,  and  would  then  enclose  the  grazing 
lands  of  the  neighborhood  that  still  belonged  to  the  Gov 
ernment.  The  sanctity  of  the  fence  was  such  that  this 
illegal  possession  prevented  honest  homesteaders  from  en 
tering  on  the  lands  thus  enclosed.  Some  States  upheld  the 
theft  and  even  exacted  taxes  from  the  illegal  holders  of  such 
lands.  Mail-carriers  on  the  plains  reported  to  the  Post 
master-General  that  they  were  sometimes  forced  to  deviate 
from  the  direct  trail  as  much  as  twenty  or  thirty  miles  be 
cause  of  the  existence  of  a  fence.  They  were  afraid  to  cut 
the  wire  and  go  across  the  enclosure  because  of  threats 
made  by  the  fence-builders.  In  August,  1885,  Cleveland 
issued  a  proclamation  against  the  illegal  enclosures,  and 
agents  of  the  Land  Office  were  turned  loose  against  the  fences. 

The  theft  of  natural  resources  from  the  public  domain 
was  universal,  but  a  more  important  cause  of  loss  was  the 
fact  that  the  land  laws  did  not  make  proper  provision  for  the 
use  of  timber,  minerals,  and  fuel.  The  resources  of  the 
United  States  lasted  so  long  that  great  stores  of  unused 
wealth  passed  unintentionally  into  private  hands,  by  means 
of  the  homestead  and  preemption  entries  that  were  intended 
only  for  agricultural  purposes. 

The  failure  of  the  continental  railroads  to  complete  the 
construction  of  their  lines  in  accordance  with  the  terms 
Railroad  of  their  land  grants  brought  up  the  question  of 
land  grants  auditing  these  grants  and  returning  the  unearned 
balances  to  the  public  domain.  In  1882  the  time  limit  of 
the  last  outstanding  grant  expired.  This  was  the  grant  of 
the  Texas  Pacific,  which,  like  the  Atlantic  and  Pacific,  whose 
time  limit  expired  in  1878,  had  hardly  begun  the  guaranteed 
construction.  The  struggle  of  the  interested  roads  to  secure 
unearned  lands  or  to  gain  extensions  of  time,  or  to  procure 
the  transfer  of  the  lands  to  other  roads  actually  built  in  the 
vicinity,  was  met  by  an  attempt  in  Congress  to  forfeit  them 


THE  NATIONAL  ESTATE  •'  103 

entirely.  The  courts  held  that  the  unearned  grants  could 
not  be  returned  to  the  public  domain  for  private  entry  with 
out  additional  legislation.  The  accounts  had  not  been  kept 
with  accuracy  and  there  was  legal  question  as  to  whether 
the  roads  were  entitled  to  receive  any  land  opposite  even 
their  completed  mileage,  if  they  failed  to  finish  the  whole 
line  on  time.  The  issuance  of  further  lands  was  brought 
to  an  end  by  Arthur.  Under  Cleveland  Congress  declared 
forfeited  the  unearned  grants  and  in  1888  the  Democrats 
boasted  in  their  campaign  textbook  that  Cleveland  had 
restored  fifty-one  million  acres  of  railway  land  to  the  pub 
lic  domain. 

The  wave  of  prosperity  begun  about  1879  was  temporarily 
checked  by  financial  troubles  in  1884.  A  panic  in  May  of 
that  year  produced  numerous  failures  affecting  panicof 
chiefly  the  stock  gamblers  in  Wall  Street.  Sev-  l884 
eral  banks  collapsed  and  numerous  brokers  were  involved, 
including  the  firm  of  Granjt  and  Ward,  whose  fate  aroused 
wide  public  interest,  because  General  Grant  was  its  figure 
head.  Grant  went  into  business  after  his  failure  to  secure 
the  nomination  in  1880,  and  attached  himself  to  a  firm  of 
brokers,  knowing  nothing  of  the  trade  and  little  about  his 
partners.  The  collapse  of  his  firm  was  due  to  their  incom 
petence  and  dishonesty.  They  had  fraudulently  promoted 
their  business  by  alleging  that  Grant's  position  enabled  them 
to  control  valuable  Government  contracts.  "The  failure," 
said  the  Nation,  "is  the  most  colossal  that  ever  took  place 
among  merely  private  firms  in  the  United  States  and  one  of 
the  most  disgraceful.  .  .  .  The  misfortune  of  the  position 
into  which  General  Grant  allowed  himself  to  get  is,  that  it  en 
ables  people  to  libel  him  with  impunity."  No  one  believed 
that  Grant  was  himself  guilty  of  misconduct,  but  his  mis 
fortune  called  attention  to  the  panic  and  to  the  unsatis 
factory  condition  of  American  finance. 

The  Bland-Allison  Act  of  1878  had  been  in  force  for  six 
years,  in  every  month  of  which  the  Secretary  of    cheap  sil- 
the  Treasury  had  been  obliged  to  buy  at  least    ver  money 
two  million  dollars'  worth  of  silver  bullion  to  be  coined  into 


104     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

standard  dollars  at  the  ratio  of  sixteen  to  one,  and  which 
were  to  be  legal  tender.  Each  Secretary  had  protested 
against  the  law  as  weakening  the  stability  of  national  credit. 
The  cheap  silver  dollars  thus  coirfcd,  which  were  worth 
eighty-five  cents  in  1884,  were  unpopular;  and  since  few 
citizens  called  for  them,  they  were  left  reposing  in  the  Treas 
ury  vaults.  The  Government  had  the  power  to  force  them 
into  circulation,  but  refrained  from  doing  so  because  un 
willing  to  promote  such  depreciation  in  the  currency.  The 
large  annual  surplus  was  great  enough  to  provide  for  the 
purchase  of  this  silver  and  to  allow  it  to  be  stored  away  un 
used  ;  but  as  the  silver  assets  in  the  Treasury  exceeded  those 
of  gold  at  the  time  of  the  panic,  a  fear  developed  that  ul 
timately  the  United  States  would  have  to  force  the  use  of 
the  cheap  dollars.  The  Topeka  Commonwealth  complained 
of  the  existence  of  five  thousand  tons  of  silver  dollars  in  the 
Treasury,  "and  yet  neither  party  has  the  courage  to  say  that 
the  coinage  should  stop,  because  the  bonanza  kings  have 
bullion  to  sell,  and  there  are  demagogues  who  cry  for  cheap 
money."  A  convention  of  silver  miners  held  in  Denver  in 
January,  1885,  demanded  free  coinage;  Cleveland  at  once 
announced  his  approval  of  Arthur's  recommendation  that 
the  coinage  should  be  stopped.  The  fear  of  cheap  money, 
intensified  by  the  suspicion  that  the  partners  of  Grant 
were  not  the  only  financial  crooks  at  large,  helped  to  retard 
recovery  from  the  crisis. 

The  panic  brought  Grant  into  the  public  eye  once  more, 
with  the  scandals  of  his  Administration  forgotten,  and  with 
Death  of  universal  affection  as  the  dominant  note.  His 
Grant  poverty,  for  he  turned  all  of  his  property  over 

to  his  creditors  at  once,  aroused  general  sympathy.  One  of 
the  Vanderbilts  advanced  funds  for  his  immediate  need,  for 
the  repayment  of  which  Grant  insisted  upon  pledging  his 
war  trophies  and  the  valuable  gifts  he  had  received  upon  his 
trip  around  the  world.  Ill  health  was  added  to  his  mis 
fortune,  and  as  the  rumor  spread  that  his  life  was  soon  to 
end,  Congress  revived  the  office  of  General  of  the  Arrny  of 
the  United  States,  and  Arthur  issued  the  commission  in 


THE  NATIONAL  ESTATE  105 

Grant's  name  as  one  of  his  last  public  acts.  Grant  had 
meanwhile  discovered  a  means  of  earning  money.  At  the 
request  of  the  editors  of  the  Century  he  prepared  an  article 
on  the  battle  of  Shiloh,  which  was  published  in  February, 
1885.  In  the  next  six  months  he  completed  on  a  sick  bed  the 
manuscript  of  his  Personal  Memoirs  that  earned  a  fortune 
for  his  family  and  that  took  rank  at  once  among  the  greatest 
military  narratives.  He  died  in  July,  1885. 

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL  NOTE 

There  are  two  excellent  treatises  on  the  pension  system,  W.  H.  Glasson, 
Federal  Military  Pensions  in  the  United  States  (1918),  and  John  W.  Oliver, 
History  of  the  Civil  War  Military  Pensions  (1917).  The  abuses  of  the  system 
are  best  described  in  the  laconic  messages  of  President  Cleveland,  in  J.  D. 
Richardson  (ed.),  Messages  and  Papers  of  the  Presidents  (1896-99).  No 
adequate  account  of  the  administration  of  the  public  lands  has  been 
written,  but  the  annual  reports  of  the  Commissioner  of  the  General  Land 
Office  contain  valuable  though  partisan  summaries,  while  Thomas  C. 
Donaldson,  The  Public  Domain  (1881),  is  an  accumulation  of  indispen 
sable  statistics.  Shosuke  Sato,  History  of  the  Land  Question  in  the  United 
States  (1886),  was  prepared  for  the  information  of  the  Japanese  Govern 
ment  and  was  printed  in  the  Johns  Hopkins  University  Studies. 


CHAPTER  XI 

THE  CLOSED  FRONTIER 

THE  American  bonanza  kings,  whose  sudden  fortunes,  de 
rived  from  the  mines  of  California  and  Colorado,  startled 
The  cattle  society  after  the  Civil  War,  had  as  later  rivals 
kings  ^g  cattie  kings,  who  entered  society  with  the 

first  great  fortunes  derived  from  agricultural  pursuits  since 
the  cotton  planters  of  the  old  South.  Their  appearance  and 
their  later  disappearance  were  due  to  the  interplay  of  forces 
that  began  to  operate  when  the  continental  railroads  reached 
the  eastern  margin  of  the  great  plains  and  which  weakened 
when  the  completion  of  these  railroads  had  destroyed  the 
open  range.  The  cow  country,  where  the  cattle  kings  had 
their  domain,  played  no  part  in  American  life  before  1865, 
and  by  1890  it  was  gone  forever,  after  bringing  a  new  phase 
of  civilization  into  existence  and  letting  loose  new  movements 
in  society. 

The  food  supply  of  the  United  States,  ordinarily  the  least 
of  its  troubles,  was  generally  provided  by  regions  near  to  the 
American  place  of  consumption.  A  few  commodities  not 
food  supply  produced  within  the  United  States  or  raised  there 
in  insufficient  amount,  like  sugar,  tea,  and  coffee,  were  always 
imported.  The  plantation  South  preferred  to  devote  its 
attention  to  its  staple  crops,  cotton  and  tobacco,  and  im 
ported  flour  and  wheat  from  other  sections  of  the  Union. 
Cincinnati  became  "Porkopolis"  before  the  Civil  War,  and 
retained  permanently  its  important  trades  in  fats  and  their 
by-products.  But  most  of  America  raised  its  own  food, 
ground  its  wheat  in  the  local  mill,  and  lived  on  a  narrow 
but  sufficient  diet  of  local  origin. 

One  influence  of  the  railroads  was  to  broaden  the  diet 
and  to  introduce  direct  competition  among  the  farmers. 
The  center  of  the  wheat  industry  swung  toward  the  north 
west,  from  central  New  York  to  the  prairies  of  Illinois^  and 


THE  CLOSED  FRONTIER  107 

Iowa,  and  thence,  with  the  completion  of  the  Northern 
Pacific  Railroad  and  the  Canadian  Pacific  (1885),  to  the 
Red  River  country  and  the  region  beyond  the  Great  Lakes. 
The  water  power  near  the  junction  of  the  Minnesota  and  the 
Mississippi  Rivers  provided  the  basis  for  the  flour  indus 
tries  of  St.  Paul  and  Minneapolis,  which  were  aided  by  the 
ownership  of  the  patent  rights  for  the  roller  process,  and 
became  a  center  of  world  supply  before  1880.  The  re 
frigerator  cars  introduced  in  the  later  sixties  widened  the 
market  for  the  citrus  fruits  of  Florida  and  California,  and 
made  possible  an  all-year-round  traffic  in  fresh  vegetables 
that  relieved  the  LTnited  States  from  the  dominance  of 
seasonal  foods  and  salt  meats.  The  great  plains,  not  yet 
occupied  by  farmers,  became  the  basis  of  a  wholesale  cattle 
industry. 

About  1866  it  was  discovered  that  cattle  could  winter  on 
the  northern  plains  without  shelter  and  be  better  fitted 
for  butchering  than  before  the  exposure.  The  wild  cattle 
of  the  plains  of  central  Texas  flourished  in  the  milder  climate 
in  huge  herds,  but  were  slight  and  stringy,  and  were  slaugh 
tered  chiefly  for  their  hides  during  the  sixties,  when  the 
buffalo  herd  was  being  extinguished  to  supply  the  demand 
for  buffalo  robes.  But  the  long-horned,  long-enduring  Texas 
cow,  though  making  poor  beef,  was  the  mother  of  sturdy 
calves,  and  wThen  the  strain  was  crossed  by  Hereford  or 
shorthorn  sires,  the  calves  could  be  fattened  into  prime  beef 
while  losing  little  of  the  resisting  power  of  the  native  stock. 

The  Union  Pacific  Railroad  building  west  across  Nebraska 
reached  the  open  plains  in  1866,  just  as  it  was  discovered  that 
cattle  could  winter  there.  One  of  its  stations,  Ogallala, 
was  seized  by  the  new  industry  as  a  convenient  shipping- 
point  for  plains-fed  stock.  As  the  trade  developed,  the 
cattle  were  bred  upon  the  Texas  plains  between  Fort  Worth 
and  the  Rio  Grande.  They  roamed,  unfenced  and  with  little 
care,  until  each  spring  they  were  rounded  up  at  convenient 
centers  by  the  owners  of  the  several  herds,  and  as  the  young 
calves  trotted  after  their  mothers  toward  the  great  pens,  they 
were  seized  and  branded  with  the  brand  of  the  owner.  The 


io8     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

heifers  and  the  mothers  were  turned  loose  again.  The  young 
steers  were  kept  together  and  were  sold  to  Northern  cattle 
men. 

The  "long  drive"  began  in  central  Texas  and  ran  a  little 
west  of  north  through  the  panhandle  of  Texas  and  the  Chero- 
The  "long  kee  country  adjoining  it  into  Kansas  and  thence 
drive"  to  Ogallala  and  the  railroad  in  Nebraska.  A 

little  later,  when  the  Northern  Pacific  had  been  constructed 
to  the  Yellowstone,  the  stations  of  Glendive  and  Miles 
City  on  that  river  lengthened  the  drive  and  reduced  the  im 
portance  of  Ogallala.  The  herds  of  cattle  left  the  round-up 
camp  in  the  custody  of  gangs  of  cowboys,  who  steered 
them  slowly  up  the  drive.  At  Dodge  City  in  southwestern 
Kansas,  where  the  Atchison,  Topeka,  and  Santa  Fe  Railroad 
touched  the  old  Spanish  boundary  at  the  one-hundredth 
meridian,  the  Southern  cowboys  often  turned  their  charges 
over  to  the  crews  provided  by  the  Northern  buyers,  who 
guarded  the  herds  to  their  destination. 

Every  year  after  1866  larger  herds  were  bred  in  Texas 
and  driven  north,  costing  their  owners  only  the  trifling 
charge  for  stock-tending,  living  on  the  public  domain,  and 
grazing  on  Government  grass.  It  was  possible  to  ship  the 
fattened  animals  to  the  slaughter-houses  at  Chicago  and 
Kansas  City,  and  make  great  profits  for  the  cattle-men  at 
the  same  time  that  the  beef  was  distributed  to  the  East  and 
to  Europe  at  prices  lower  than  local  beef  could  be  obtained. 
Fresh  meat  became  a  more  important  item  of  American 
food  than  it  had  ever  been  before.  The  agricultural  de 
pression  in  Europe  in  the  later  seventies  was  intensified  by 
the  competition  of  the  cheap  American  foods. 

Beef  became  a  new  article  of  commerce  and  brought  into 
existence  new  forms  of  commercial  organization  that  in- 
Chicago  tensified  the  cry  against  monopoly.  In  eveiy 
stockyards  American  city  of  importance  the  local  slaughter 
house  had  been  a  problem  because  it  was  a  necessary  evil. 
Always  offensive  to  the  neighborhood,  there  was  no  way  of 
doing  without  it,  but  its  presence  was  commonly  restricted 
by  local  ordinances.  In  Chicago  in  1865  the  numerous  local 


THE  CLOSED  FRONTIER  109 

stockyards  were  merged  into  a  single  union  stockyard  on 
the  western  margin  of  the  city,  and  there  it  was  proposed  to 
concentrate  the  local  traffic.  Almost  immediately  there  be 
gan  the  endless  procession  of  stock-cars  laden  with  Western 
steers  that  were  to  force  the  conversion  of  the  butchers' 
business  into  a  national  industry.  The  stockyards  district 
was  of  necessity  enlarged.  To  the  slaughter-houses  there 
were  added  a  chain  of  packing-houses,  where  the  meat  that 
could  not  be  refrigerated  and  shipped  fresh  was  tinned  or 
converted  into  some  other  form  of  preserved  meat.  The 
ice  machine  and  the  tin-can  machine  were  active  agents  in 
the  development  of  the  new  trade.  Around  the  packing 
houses  there  arose  a  network  of  by-product  factories  that 
utilized  the  hides  and  hair,  the  horns  and  hoofs,  and  even 
the  blood  of  the  animals,  and  increased  in  number  as  in 
dustrial  chemistry  solved  the  new  problems  of  manufacture. 
The  Chicago  stockyards  became  the  center  of  a  world  of  its 
own,  where  the  names  of  Armour,  Swift,  Hammond,  Morris, 
Libby,  and  McNeal  represented  the  forces  of  control,  and 
where  unskilled  labor  of  foreign  extraction  did  much  of  the 
work. 

The  invasion  of  Chicago  beef  was  resented  by  local  butch 
ers,  who  formed  protective  associations  in  all  parts  of  the 
United  States  and  tried  in  vain  to  stay  the  revolution  in 
their  industry.  The  cry  of  monopoly  was  raised  against  the 
packers,  not  only  by  the  butchers  who  could  not  meet  their 
competition,  but  by  the  stock-men,  who  believed  that  il 
legal  combinations  held  down  the  price  of  steers.  The  rail 
roads  welcomed  the  new  industry,  which  created  a  demand 
for  transportation,  but  soon  found  themselves  obliged  to 
meet  the  dickering  propensities  of  the  packers,  as  they  were 
already  obliged  to  meet  those  of  the  oil  monopoly.  By 
playing  off  one  road  against  the  other,  the  larger  packers 
secured  for  themselves  special  rates  and  rebates,  and  drove 
from  the  business  many  of  their  less  sKillful  competitors. 

The  Eastern  butchers  could  only  scold  against  the  monop 
oly.  Their  trade  in  its  older  form  was  doomed  to  speedy 
extinction.  The  cattle-men  on  the  Western  plains  were 


i  io     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

more  able  to  take  steps  to  fight  the  packers'  monopoly, 
Cattle  and  there  arose  in  Nebraska  and  Dakota  great 

ranches  ranches  where  the  cattle,  driven  up  from  the 

plains,  were  held  for  the  market.  Irrthe  first  decade  of  the 
cow  country  the  cattle  were  shipped  East  as  soon  as  stock- 
cars  could  be  had  at  Ogallala  or  Glendive  to  handle  them. 
When  the  Chicago  price  was  high,  the  cars  were  hard  to  get. 
When  the  market  broke,  the  cowmen  had  no  option  but  to 
ship  their  steers  and  to  accept  the  price  fixed  by  the  packers 
at  the  Chicago  yards.  By  fencing  in  a  ranch  along  the 
Northern  Pacific,  it  was  possible  to  reduce  the  cost  of  stock- 
tending  and  to  hold  the  steers  without  great  loss  for  a  year 
or  more.  The  fact  that  the  land  law  provided  no  means 
for  the  acquisition  of  such  ranches  did  not  prevent  their 
growth.  Some  were  bought  openly  from  the  railroads, 
others  were  acquired  in  collusion  or  abuse  of  the  Home 
stead  and  Preemption  Laws,  or  were  deliberately  fenced  in 
without  a  shadow  of  right.  Eastern  capital  was  drawn  into 
the  profitable  business,  until  by  1885  there  were  more  cattle 
on  the  plains  than  the  market  could  absorb,  and  the  industry 
was  threatened  by  losses  due  to  glutting  the  market.  Most 
famous  among  the  Northern  ranches  was  that  at  Chimney 
Butte  on  the  Little  Missouri  in  Dakota,  v/hich  Theodore 
Roosevelt  bought  while  he  was  in  the  New  York  Assembly, 
and  which  remained  his  playground  throughout  the  decade. 

From  its  beginning  in  1866  the  cattle  industry  on  the 
open  plains  developed  until  by  1880  it  was  world-famous  and 
European  capitalists  began  to  invest  in  ranches  of  their  own. 
The  sympathy  with  Ireland  in  her  land  controversies  made 
these  holdings  a  matter  of  public  concern  in  the  United 
States,  and  some  observers  thought  they  could  detect  a 
danger  of  alien  landlordism  in  America.  The  real  danger 
was  the  destruction  of  the  industry  by  its  own  internal 
processes. 

Every  year  after  1866  the  flood  of  homesteaders  washed 

farther  out  upon  the  plains,  and  the  fences  of  the  farmers 

-or  "nesters,"  as  the  cowboys  called  them  —  narrowed 

the  eastern  limits  of  the  range.     Every  year  the  enclosures 


THE  CLOSED  FRONTIER  in 

restricted  the  freedom  of  the  "  long  drive."  The  wire  fences 
broke  up  the  unity  of  the  grazing  lands,  and  the  End  of 
efforts  of  the  cowmen  to  safeguard  themselves  the  "long 
by  these  made  it  more  difficult  to  drive  their 
stock.  As  the  open  drive  was  restricted,  experiments  were 
made  in  shipping  the  cattle  north,  but  the  natural  courses 
of  the  railroads  did  not  serve  this  traffic.  By  1884  still 
another  obstruction  appeared.  As  early  as  1879  the  British 
Government  forbade  the  importation  of  American  cattle 
on  the  ground  that  they  were  often  diseased,  and  in  addi 
tion  to  being  unfit  for  consumption,  were  likely  to  contami 
nate  the  British  herds.  Texas  fever  came  to  be  talked  about, 
together  with  hoof-and-mouth  disease  and  tuberculosis. 
The  State  of  Kansas  passed  a  quarantine  law  in  1885,  for 
bidding  the  driving  of  Texas  cattle  into  the  State,  and 
guards  with  shotguns  patrolled  the  border  of  the  State,  to 
maintain  the  law.  The  next  year  Colorado  passed  a  similar 
law  and  effectively  closed  the  drive. 

Associations  of  cattle-men  saw  the  impending  termina 
tion  of  the  business.  In  1884  they  held  two  conventions, 
one  at  Chicago  where  the  stock-men  were  chiefly  concerned 
with  the  new  dairy  interests  of  Illinois  and  Wisconsin,  and 
one  at  St.j-.ouis,  where  the  Western  dealers  discussed  their 
future.  In  the  latter  convention  they  turned  instinctively 
to  Washington,  as  the  frontier  has  always  done.  They  pre 
sented  a  request  for  the  erection  of  a  national  cattle  trail 
from  central  Texas  to  the  Canadian  line,  wide  enough  for 
the  herds  to  find  abundant  pastures  and  forever  to  be  with 
held  from  private  entry  or  state  restriction.  "  As  the  Indian 
gave  way  to  the  pioneer,"  said  a  speaker  at  one  of  the  cattle 
conventions,  "so  must  the  cowboy  go  before  the  settler, 
and  the  ranche  take  the  place  of  the  range,  until  the  eight 
million  acres  of  land  now  grazed  by  cattle  shall  teem  with 
villages  and  model  farms  for  the  cultivation  of  refined  cat 
tle  cared  for,  not  by  cowboys  with  revolvers,  but  cowboys 
with  brains."  After  1885  the  cow  country  was  gone  and  the 
beef  industry  underwent  a  long  reorganization. 

The  charges  of  the  cattle-men  that  the  railroads  treated 


ii2     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

them  unfairly  and  that  the  packers  operated  a  selfish 
interstate  monopoly  added  to  the  complaints  that  grew  in 
commerce  volume  through  the  eighties  and  that  led  toward 
an  assertion  of  national  power  over  the  railroads.  The  fact 
that  the  continental  systems  were  substantially  complete 
by  1884  and  that  the  country  was  beginning  to  regret  its 
generosity  in  the  land  grants  gave  further  impetus  to  the 
same  movement.  The  Senate  in  1885  yielded  to  the  pres 
sure.  A  select  committee  on  interstate  commerce,  with 
Shelby  M.  Cullom,  of  Illinois,  as  chairman,  was  directed 
to  make  inquiries  into  the  needs  for  regulation  and  the 
methods  of  accomplishing  it. 

The  earliest  important  movement  for  railroad  regulation 
in  the  interest  of  fair  play  and  of  the  community  served  by 
the  road,  arose  in  the  States  northwest  of  Chicago  about 
1873.  The  railroads  in  this  region  preceded  much  of  the 
population  instead  of  following  it,  and  were  not  restrained 
by  parallel  and  competing  water  routes  or  well-established 
highways.  The  export  surplus  of  the  region  was  chiefly 
grain,  for  hauling  and  storing  which  the  railroad  companies 
and  the  terminal  elevators  which  they  controlled  frankly 
charged  "all  the  traffic  would  bear."  In  the  flush  years 
between  1865  and  1872  the  Northwestern  farmer  made 
money  in  spite  of  the  rising  value  of  the  greenbacks  and  the 
high  freight  tariffs  of  the  railroads.  The  depression  of  1873 
intensified  the  greenback  movement  and  caused  the  farm 
ers  to  join  by  hundreds  of  thousands  a  new  society,  the 
Patrons  of  Husbandry. 

The  Patrons  of  Husbandry  were  organized  in  1867  as  an 
agricultural  benevolent  society,  but  found  few  interested 
The  supporters  for  half  a  decade.  The  National 

Granger  Grange,  as  their  central  organization  was  called, 

movement  ,        -      .    ,  r  ^ 

was  composed  of  delegates  from  the  State 
Granges,  and  these  in  turn  gathered  in  the  representatives 
of  the  local  Granges,  to  which  the  farmers  belonged.  The 
Granger  movement  became  a  reality  when  the  farmers  be 
came  aware  of  their  dissatisfaction,  sought  for  a  means  of 
venting  it,  and  found  in  the  mechanism  of  the  local  Grange 


THE  CLOSED  FRONTIER  113 

a  tool  ready  to  be  used.  The  membership  of  the  Patrons  of 
Husbandry  began  to  grow  after  1870.  In  the  ensuing  State 
elections  candidates  found  it  prudent  to  avow  their  interest 
in  the  regulaton  of  the  railroad  rates,  which  was  the  chief 
subject  of  discussion  in  the  Granger  gatherings.  State  laws 
were  passed,  culminating  in  the  Potter  Law  of  Wisconsin  in/ 
1874,  which  asserted  the  right  of  the  Commonwealth  to  reg-/' 
ulate  the  railroads'  charge  for  service.  The  railroads  of  the 
Granger  district  ignored  the  legislation  when  they  could  and 
fought  the  Granger  laws  with  all  the  legal  powers  at  their 
disposal.  Most  of  the  laws  were  faulty,  being  based  upon 
hostility  to  the  roads,  rather  than  upon  an  understanding 
of  their  business,  but  the  Supreme  Court  of  Wisconsin  ap 
proved  the  theory  of  the  Potter  Law,  and  in  March,  1877,  the 
Supreme  Court  of  the  United  States  in  a  series  of  Granger 
cases  upheld  the  common-law  right  of  a  State  to  regulate  its 
railroads.  The  case  of  Munn  vs.  Illinois  was  the  basic  case 
in  connection  with  which  the  decision  was  handed  down. 

Most  of  the  States  followed  the  precedent  of  the  Granger 
legislatures  and  passed  rate-fixing  laws  or  created  railroad 
commissions  before  1885.  The  problem  was  gradually 
lifted  out  of  the  field  of  class  politics  into  that  of  economic 
investigation.  In  the  WindoniJR.eport  made  to  the  Sen 
ate  in  1873,  and  the  Hepburn  Report  made  to  the  New 
York  Legislature  at  the  end  of  the  decade,  and  in  the  annual 
reports  of  the  various  railroad  commissions,  data  were  ac 
cumulated  upon  which  to  found  the  conviction  that  the 
railroads  needed  to  be  regulated,  and  that  no  single  State1 
was  powerful  enough  to  do  it.  In  a  case  decided  in  1885 
the  Supreme  Court  reached  this  latter  conclusion,  and 
declared  that  the  regulation  by  a  State  of  any  portion  of 
an  interstate  journey  was  an  infringement  upon  the  exclu 
sive  powers  of  Congress  over  interstate  commerce.  The 
whole  machinery  of  regulation  was  thus  threatened.  The 
completion  of  the  continental  railroads  at  the  same  time 
broadened  the  conviction  of  a  need  for  regulation,  and  the 
Cullom  committee,  reporting  in  January,  1886,  made  a 
similar  recommendation  to  Congress. 


ii4     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

An  Interstate  Commerce  Act  was  passed  in  February, 
1887,  forbidding  combinations  among  the  railroads  and 
creating  a  non-partisan  Interstate  Commerce  Commission 
to  investigate  and  report  upon  grievances  against  the  roads. 
The  pooling  of  freight  receipts  by  competing  roads  .was 
prohibited,  and  they  were  forbidden  to  charge  more  for  a 
shoTtJiaul  than  for  a  longer  haul  over  the  same  track  in  the 
same  direction.  The  attempt  to  force  the  roads  to  compete 
with  each  other  for  their  business  was  in  part  nullified  by 
this  "long-and-short-haul  clause,"  because  since  no  two 
roads  between  competing  points  rendered  their  service 
under  precisely  the  same  conditions,  it  was  sometimes  im 
possible  for  the  longer  road  to  compete  for  through  traffic 
without  fixing  a  rate  for  its  long-haul  service  which  would 
have  been  ruinous  if  applied  to  its  whole  business.  Judge 
Thomas  M.  Cooley,  of  Michigan,  became  the  guiding  spirit 
of  the  Interstate  Commerce  Commission,  and  formulated 
the  principles  upon  which  it  operated  until  its  powers  were 
revised  in  1906. 

Another  non-partisan  measure  inspired  by  the  impor 
tance  of  the  agricultural  problem  was  the  creation  of  a  De- 
Department  partment  of  Agriculture  with  a  seat  in  the 
of  Agri-  /  Cabinet.  There  had  been  a  department  of  that 
name  since  1862,  but  with  subordinate  rank 
under  the  Interior  Department.  It  was  enlarged  in  1884 
by  the  addition  of  a  Bureau  of  Animal  Industry  for  the 
purpose  of  controlling  cattle  disease  and  lessening  the  dan 
ger  of  its  spread.  Cleveland  signed  the  bill  creating  a  new 
department,  of  which  ex-Governor  Jeremiah  M.  Rusk,  of 
Wisconsin,  was  appointed  Secretary  by  President  Harrison. 
In  1890  it  was  given  the  duty  to  inspect  cattle  and  fresh 
meat  offered  for  export.  The  reluctance  of  European  Gov 
ernments  to  concede  the  sanitary  character  of  American 
foods  forced  this  action  upon  Congress.  The  consequence 
of  the  inspection  service  was  an  extension  of  the  technical 
duties  of  the  United  States,  and  was  one  of  the  facts  tend 
ing  to  change  the  nature  of  the  National  Government. 

Further  examination  of  the  remaining  natural  resources 


THE  CLOSED  FRONTIER  115 

was  authorized  at  the  same  time.  Ten  years  earlier  the 
survey  work  of  the  Interior  and  War  Departments  had 
been  combined  in  the  Geological  Survey  in  the  Department 
of  the  Interior.  Under  the  direction  of  Clarence  King  and 
Major  J.  W.  Powell  it  turned  the  resources  of  science  upon 
public  lands.  Powell's  report  upon  the  arid  regions  was 
followed  in  1889  by  appropriations  for  the  survey  of  all 
the  sites  available  for  the  construction  of  reservoirs  and 
irrigation  projects.  The  Preemption  Law,  whose  abuse 
was  an  old  nuisance,  was  repealed  in  1891. 

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL  NOTE 

Ethelbert  Talbot,  My  People  of  the  Plains  (1906),  gives  a  sympathetic 
picture  of  the  spirit  of  the  vanishing  frontier,  which  was  also  caught  by 
Owen  Wister,  The  Virginian  (1902).  The  cattle  industry  is  described  in 
Emerson  Hough,  The  Story  of  the  Cowboy  (1897);  Clara  M.  Love,  "History 
of  the  Cattle  Industry  in  the  Southwest,"  in  Southwestern  Historical  Quar 
terly  (1916);  and  F.  L.  Paxson,  "The  Cow  Country,"  in  American  His 
torical  Review,  October,  1916.  Edward  W.  Martin  (pseud,  for  J.  D. 
McCabe),  History  of  the  Grange  Movement  (1874),  is  a  contemporary  sub 
scription  history  that  was  circulated  among  the  farmers.  The  Granger 
movement  is  exhaustively  treated  in  Solon  J.  Buck,  The  Granger  Movement 
(1913).  The  Windom  Report  on  Transportation  Routes  to  the  Seaboard  is  in 
43d  Cong.,  ist  Sess.,  Sen.  Rep.  307.  The  Cullom  Report  of  Senate  Com 
mittee  on  Interstate  Commerce  is  in  49th  Cong.,  ist  Sess.,  Sen.  Rep.  46. 
Joseph  Gilpin  Pyle,  The  Life  of  James  J.  Hill  (1917),  contains  much  material 
upon  frontier  problems. 


CHAPTER  XII 

WILD  WEST  AND  SPORT 

THE  spirit  of  the  open  frontier  passed  out  of  American 
life  forever  in  the  decade  of  the  eighties,  leaving  behind  it 
Frontier  survivals  that  lasted  for  another  generation,  and 
spirit  inducing  the  development  of  substitutes  to  take 

its  place.  The  frontier  while  it  lasted  was  a  social  safety- 
valve  that  prevented  the  rise  of  social  pressure  or  class  an- 
Itagonism  to  the  danger  point.  Not  only  upon  the  western 
margin  of  the  United  States,  but  in  every  State  farm  land 
was  either  free  or  cheap,  and  invited  each  generation  to 
enlarge  the  area  of  settlement  and  erect  new  homes.  There 
was  no  chance  for  the  socially  discontented  to  become  nu-" 
merous  or  ominous.  No  oppressed  lower  class  could  be 
created  in  a  community  in  which  any  young  man  with  rea 
sonable  nerve  and  luck  might  hope  to  be  an  independent 
farmer  before  he  was  thirty.  All  American  society  was 
close  to  its  frontier  origin,  and  the  man  of  affairs,  wherever 
he  found  himself,  normally  looked  back  to  his  boyhood  on 
the  farm. 

The  influence  of  universal  farm  life  with  independence 
within  easy  reach  of  all  gave  its  peculiar  aspect  to  the 

»  American  character.  The  more  picturesque  life  upon  the 
actual  frontier  provided  the  theme  that  men  of  letters 
grasped  in  the  second  quarter  of  the  century.  James  Fen- 
imore  Cooper  with  his  romances  of  the  frontier  made  himself 
a  lasting  place  in  American  letters.  His  Deerslayer  and 
Chingachgook  were  unreal  portraits,  but  they  coincided 
with  what  his  Eastern  readers  thought  the  West  to  be,  and 
perpetuated  the  spirit  of  the  frontier  life. 

In  one  form  or  another  this  spirit  permeated  American 
society,  and  when  the  creative  force  was  stopped,  its  sur 
vivals  carried  on  the  legend.  In  December,  1887,  a  group 
of  the  young  men  who  had  hunted  on  the  buffalo  range 


WILD  WEST  AND  SPORT  117 

and  had  followed  the  rear  guard  of  American  big  game 
into  the  mountains  organized  the  Boone  and  Crockett  Club, 
through  which  they  cherished  a  memory  of  the  past  and 
a  love  of  outdoor  life.  A  few  years  later  they  exhibited  at 
the  Chicago  World's  Fair  a  frontiersman's  log  cabin  set  on 
an  island  in  its  typical  surroundings.  "The  club  felt  very 
strongly,"  wrote  Theodore  Roosevelt,  one  of  its  members, 
"that  the  life  of  the  pioneer  settler,  the  life  of  the  man  who 
struck  out  into  the  wilderness  as  part  of  the  vanguard  of 
civilization,  and  made  his  living  largely  ir  warfare  with  the 
wild  game,  represented  a  phase  of  our  history  so  character 
istic  and  yet  so  evanescent  that  it  would  be  a  mistake  not 
to  have  it  represented.  .  .  .  There  is  nothing  in  the  history 
of  any  other  nation  which  quite  corresponds  to  it."  Roose 
velt  set  to  work  to  write  the  history  of  the  frontier  in  his 
Winning  of  the  West  (1889-96),  and  a  more  genuine  plains 
man  than  he  dramatized  it. 

Colonel  William  F.  Cody,  known  through  a  generation  in 
Europe  and  America  as  "  Buffalo  Bill,"  grew  to  boyhood  on 
the  margin  of  the  plains.  At  the  age  of  four-  "Buffalo 
teen  he  was  rider  on  the  pony  express  which  Bl11' 
carried  the  mails  in  less  than  eight  days  across  the  plains 
from  St.  Joseph  on  the  Missouri  to  Sacramento.  He  later 
became  a  professional  hunter  providing  fresh  buffalo  meat 
by  contract  to  the  construction  camps  of  the  Union  Pacific 
Railroad  while  it  was  building  across  Nebraska,  and  when 
the  road  was  done,  he  was  in  demand  as  guide  and  friend 
for  Eastern  sportsmen  and  distinguished  foreigners,  who 
wished  to  hunt  big  game  and  see  the  West. 

About  1872  Cody  went  upon  the  stage,  acting  in  cheap 
Western  melodramas  whose  Indians  were  all  painted  white 
men.  In  1883  he  prepared  a  larger  venture,  gathering  at  his 
ranch  on  the  North  Platte  cowboys  and  mustangs  as  well 
as  real  Indians  borrowed  from  the  reservation.  Here  he 
organized  his  Wild  West  Show  with  its  open-air  presenta 
tion  of  cowboy  life.  His  performance  leaped  into  immedi 
ate  popularity.  In  1887  he  took  it  to  London  to  exhibit  at 
the  American  Exposition  there  in  the  Jubilee  year  of  Queen 


Ii8     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

Victoria,  and  earned  even  greater  popularity  than  at  home. 
The  novel  life  aroused  the  interest  of  the  youthful  royalties 
gathered  in  London  that  summer.  Command  perform 
ances  were  frequent  and  Cody  returned  their  hospitalities 
with  Western  barbecues  in  the  big  arena.  Alexandra,  then 
Princess  of  Wales,  came  repeatedly  with  her  children,  and 
like  the  rest  of  royalty  insisted  upon  riding  around  the 
arena  in  the  Deadwood  coach  during  the  Indian  attack. 
So  long  as  it  was  possible  to  obtain  real  Indians  and  cow 
boys,  the  popularity  of  the  Wild  West  Show  continued,  and 
when  Cody  died  in  1917  his  rivals  were  still  imitating  his 
performance  and  moving-picture  actors  without  number 
had  seized  upon  his  theme. 

The  Wild  West  Show  preserved  a  part  of  the  disappear 
ing  life  with  the  technique  derived  from  an  even  greater 
"Greatest  spectacle,  then  at  its  height  —  P.  T.  Barnum's 
Show  on  "Greatest  Show  on  Earth."  It  was  the  mission 
of  Barnum.  who  turned  his  Yankee  ingenuity  to 
the  trade  of  showman  in  1835,  to  make  amusement  and 
recreation  respectable.  The  Puritan  ideals  and  the  fron 
tier  simplicity  of  American  life  had  restricted  the  develop 
ment  of  public  amusements.  The  theater  was  unimportant 
outside  the  cities  and  in  bad  repute  within  them,  but  there 
existed  in  most  of  the  population  sufficient  means  to  patron 
ize  whatever  entertainments  might  arouse  their  interest. 
Barnum,  with  genius  for  both  entertainment  and  advertis 
ing,  became  a  great  figure  in  New  York  with  his  American 
Museum.  His  exploitation  of  the  dwarf  Tom  Thumb  and 
his  later  importation  of  the  Swedish  singer  Jenny  Lind  in 
1850  were  typical  successes  in  his  career.  Out  of  his  mu 
seum  and  menagerie  there  developed  a  traveling  circus  that 
he  put  upon  the  road  in  1871,  and  that  ten  years  later  was 
famous  under  its  boasting  name,  with  three  rings  under  the 
main  top  and  its  gigantic  side-shows.  His  importation  of 
Jumbo  in  1882  failed  to  produce  an  international  clash  as 
Punch  feared,  but  led  to  violent  and  profitable  publicity. 
His  royal  Burmese  white  elephant,  imported  a  little  later, 
was  white  enough  to  be  unusual,  but  not  white  enough  to 


WILD  WEST  AND  SPORT  119 

be  profitable,  and  added  the  phrase  "white  elephant"  to 
the  rich  American  vernacular. 

In  the  fifty  years  during  which  Barnum  was  prominent 
before  the  public,  American  life  lost  its  rural  simplicity 
and  city  populations  came  into  existence,  living  a  narrower 
and  less  satisfying  life  than  that  of  the  farm,  and  craving 
new  outlets  to  restore  their  spiritual  balance.  Farm  life 
had  given  opportunities  for  a  rounded  development  that 
was  denied  not  only  to  the  inhabitant  of  the  city  tenements, 
but  even  to  the  city  well-to-do.  The  latter  now  organized 
their  country  clubs,  yacht  clubs,  and  athletic  clubs,  while 
the  former  became  willing  supporters  of  public  recreation 
and  organized  sport. 

The  rise  of  sport  in  America  between  the  Centennial  Ex 
position  in  Philadelphia  in  1876  and  the  World's  Fair  at 
Chicago  in  1893  is  due  in  part  to  a  readjustment  Rise  Of 
of  American  life  from  rural  to  urban  conditions,  sport 
and  provides  the  outlets  that  replaced  the  frontier  as  it  was 
closed.  Before  the  Civil  War  there  was  little  sport  in 
America.  The  Turnverein  members  had  imported  group 
gymnastics  from  Germany.  There  was  some  racing  of 
both  horses  and  boats,  and  there  was  much  hunting  on  a 
small  scale,  but  sport  was  generally  only  an  afterthought 
and  a  by-product.  The  breed  of  race-horses  that  Diomed, 
winner  of  the  English  Derby  of  1780,  started  in  Virginia  in 
his  old  age,  contributed  to  the  development  of  the  Ameri 
can  thoroughbred  and  the  permanent  interest  in  racing 
stock.  In  1866  the  American  Jockey  Club  was  opened  on 
the  outskirts  of  New  York,  and  was  followed  by  similar 
race-tracks  that  made  racing  a  spectators'  sport,  enteVtain- 
ing  the  city  population  and  discredited  by  the  gamblers 
who  infested  it.  Robert  Bonner,  who  owned  Maud  S. 
when  her  records  beat  the  world,  found  the  burden  of  proof 
still  against  him,  as  the  public  asked  why  a  man  of  known 
respectability  should  devote  so  much  of  his  attention  to 
sport. 

The  America's  cup  was  brought  to  the  United  States  from 
the  royal  yacht  races  held  at  Cowes  in  1851,  and  induced 


120    RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

a  long  series  of  English  sportsmen  to  undertake  to  take  it 
Y    ,  .  back.    During  the  eighties  the  Atalanta  (1881), 

the  Genesta  (1885),  the  Galatea  (1886),  and  the 
Thistle  (1887)  made  the  attempt  in  vain,  and  a  generation 
later  the  famous  cup  was  still  in  the  hands  of  the  New  York 
Yacht  Club,  and  the  hope  of  its  recovery  was  still  alive  in 
Britain. 

Promoters  of  sport  as  a  spectacle  found  that  it  could  be 
made  to  pay,  with  city  audiences  anxious  for  a  chance  to 

contribute  to  its  support.      In  1878  an  English 

sportsman,  Sir  John  Astley,  offered  a  purse  of 
£500  and  a  championship  belt  worth  £100  more  to  estab 
lish  a  championship  for  a  six  days'  go-as-you-please  race. 
Walking  races  among  professional  pedestrians  had  been 
popular  for  some  years,  but  had  been  marred  by  the  inabil 
ity  of  referees  to  maintain  any  effective  definition  of  walk 
ing.  The  Astley  belt  was  competed  for  in  London  and  was 
won  by  a  Chicago  Irishman  named  O'Leary,  who  covered 
520  miles  in  six  days.  The  trophy  was  defended  four  times 
before  the  end  of  1879,  and  other  similar  races  had  ample 
patronage. 

The  interest  in  walking  races  was  surpassed  by  the  re 
viving  interest  in   prize-fighting,   and   the  personality  of 
.  pugilists  who  followed  the  profession.     The  fight 

of  John  C.  Heenan  against  the  English  champion, 
Sayers,  in  1860  was  the  last  of  the  great  fights  of  the  old 
school  before  promoters  built  arenas  and  commercialized 
the  pastime.  About  1880  a  Boston  Irishman,  John  L. 
Sullivan,  began  to  attract  interest  by  his  engaging  person 
ality  and  his  genius  for  slugging.  In  February,  1882,  he 
won  the  championship  of  America  from  one  Paddy  Ryan, 
and  thereafter  repeatedly  crowded  the  arena  at  Madison 
Square  Garden.  Like  Buffalo  Bill  he  went  to  England  for 
the  Jubilee  in  1887,  where  his  conduct  when  he  met  the 
Prince  of  Wales  and  treated  him  as  an  equal  was  widely 
noticed.  Sullivan  differed  from  many  of  the  professional 
fighters  in  his  willingness  to  take  punishment  as  well  as  to 
give  it.  In  1889  a  bout  was  arranged  between  him  and  Jake 


WILD  WEST  AND  SPORT  121 

Kilrain  for  a  new  diamond  belt  offered  by  the  editor  of  the 
Police  Gazette,  and  what  they  called  the  heavyweight  cham 
pionship  of  the  world.  He  won  this  fight  and  his  admirers 
talked  of  running  him  for  Congress  on  the  Democratic 
ticket.  He  went  on  a  boxing  tour  to  Australia  instead  and 
came  back  to  lose  his  title  to  a  new  winner,  James  J.  Cor- 
bett,  in  1892.  The  popularity  of  boxing  was  well  estab 
lished,  with  the  protests  of  the  refined  and  tender-hearted 
more  than  overborne  by  the  interest  of  those  who  liked  to 
watch  it  or  participate.  Theodore  Roosevelt  engaged  in 
public  boxing  while  an  undergraduate  at  Harvard,  boxed 
with  fighters  whenever  he  had  a  chance  at  the  White  House 
or  elsewhere,  and  maintained  a  personal  friendship  with 
John  L.  Sullivan  throughout  his  life. 

The  National  League  of  baseball  clubs  was  formed  in 
1876  with  eight  member  teams:  Boston,  Hartford,  Chicago, 
St.  Louis,  Louisville,  Cincinnati,  the  Mutuals 
(New  York),  and  the  Athletics  (Philadelphia). 
It  marked  the  transition  of  baseball  from  a  players'  sport, 
loosely  organized  though  widely  enjoyed,  into  a  profitable 
spectators'  sport.  Baseball  evolved  from  earlier  games  of 
ball  played,  some  of  them,  between  the  Mexican  and  Civil 
Wars.  There  was  an  organization  of  baseball  players  as 
early  as  1858,  who  enjoyed  the  game  with  a  soft  ball  and 
without  gloves,  masks,  or  protectors.  The  Civil  War  stim 
ulated  the  game.  It  brought  together  groups  of  young  men 
who  sought  recreation  in  their  off  hours,  and  taught  the 
game  to  men  from  all  sections,  who  carried  it  home  with 
them  after  demobilization.  In  the  later  sixties  local  base 
ball  clubs  sprang  into  existence  in  all  parts  of  the  United 
States  and  the  Cincinnati  Red  Stockings,  a  strictly  pro 
fessional  team,  went  on  tour  in  1869  with  great  profit  to 
themselves.  The  deliberate  organization  of  leagues  of 
traveling  clubs  followed  in  due  course. 

As  a  spectators'  game  baseball  had  no  equal.  The  city 
ball  parks  operated  as  vents  where  the  surplus  enthusiasm 
of  the  crowds  upon  the  bleachers  was  released  with  much 
noise  but  a  minimum  of  danger.  An  American  Associa- 


122     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

tion  of  clubs  appeared  in  1882  as  a  rival  of  the  National 
League,  and  minor  or  ''bush"  leagues  grew  up  among 
groups  of  cities  everywhere.  Albert  G.  Spalding  was  the 
best-known  patron  of  the  game.  He  helped  to  organize 
the  National  League,  won  the  pennant  year  after  year  with 
his  Chicago  team,  and  in  1889  took  two  full  teams  on  a  tour 
around  the  world.  Baseball  was  the  only  game  of  the  sort 
whose  vogue  was  universal.  Cricket,  of  similar  fame  in 
England,  was  an  exotic  in  America.  It  was  played  a  little 
on  the  fields  around  Boston,  New  York,  and  Philadelphia, 
and  Dr.  S.  Weir  Mitchell  remembered  to  have  played  it  as 
early  as  1845.  Philadelphia  developed  a  group  of  country 
clubs  where  cricket  was  the  leading  sport,  and  occasionally 
visiting  teams  from  Canada  or  England  were  invited  for  a 
contest.  The  "gentlemen  of  Philadelphia"  in  September, 
1885,  for  the  first  time  beat  eleven  Britishers  with  an  eleven 
ojxAmericans. 

Baseball  and  cricket  occupied  the  border-land  between 
the  spectators'  sport  and  that  of  the  participants.  The  city 
Amateur  crowds  wanted  recreation  as  well  as  entertain- 
sports  ment,  and  those  who  could  afford  it  joined  with 

their  friends  to  make  it  possible.  Boys  who  went  to  col 
lege  found  football  and  baseball,  rowing  and  track  athletics, 
waiting  for  them.  The  Intercollegiate  Athletic  Association 
came  into  existence  in  1876  as  did  the  National  Amateur 
Athletic  Association  of  America.  These  societies  drew  the 
line  between  amateur  and  professional  sport,  and  endeav 
ored  to  secure  control  over  the  former,  and  to  maintain  a 
real  distinction  between  those  who  played  games  for  fun 
and  those  who  performed  for  money.  Fields  were  acquired 
on  the  unbuilt  margins  of  the  cities,  where  the  games  were 
played.  Club-houses  were  provided  with  dressing-rooms 
and  baths,  and  before  long  other  conveniences  made  their 
appearance  in  the  form  of  general  club-houses  for  non- 
playing  members,  women's  club-houses,  and  junior  buildings 
for  the  children  of  members.  The  athletic  club  became  the 
center  of  recreation  in  many  a  community  and  evolved 
easily  and  naturally  into  the  country  club.  A  decade  later, 


WILD  WEST  AND  SPORT  123 

however,  when  golf  was  imported  into  the  United  States, 
and  two  decades  later,  when  the  motor  car  had  made  its 
appearance,  the  country  club  developed  its  largest  useful 
ness. 

The  participants'  sports  increased  in  number  and  variety 
as  the  population  grew  that  needed  them.  About  1863  one 
Plimpton  invented  the  roller  skate  and  bred  a  mania  that 
raged  endemic  among  the  youth  and  as  an  intermittent 
epidemic  among  adults  thereafter.  Halls  were  converted 
into  skating  rinks  and  great  buildings  were  erected  for  skat 
ing.  The  range  of  the  sport  was  widened  when  concrete 
sidewalks  and  asphalt  streets  appeared  in  the  early  eighties. 
Six  days'  skating  races  were  profitable  for  their  promoters, 
and  a  record  of  1090  miles  was  made  in  such  a  race  in 
1885.  Women  and  girls  took  to  the  pastime,  causing  their 
elders  to  grieve  over  the  demoralization  of  the  growing 
generation. 

Croquet  made  its  appearance  as  a  mild  sport  in  the  same 
years,  and  had  a  wide  popularity  because  of  the  simplicity 
of  its  equipment.  The  handful  of  players  who  treated  it  as 
a  game  of  skill  rather  than  as  a  pastime  began  their  national 
conventions  in  1879,  and  persisted  in  them  at  the  per 
manent  grounds  of  the  National  Croquet  Association  at 
Norwich,  Connecticut. 

The  improvements  in  city  streets  and  country  roads  made 
possible  the  rapid  adoption  of  the  bicycle.  Contrivances  of 
this  sort  were  experimented  with  for  many  years  before  the 
machine  with  its  large  front  wheel,  its  slender  steel  spokes, 
and  its  rubber  tires  assumed  a  standard  form.  Colonel 
A.  A.  Pope,  of  Hartford,  Connecticut,  imported  English 
bicycles  in  1878,  and  began  to  copy  and  improve  upon  them. 
Bicycle  clubs  were  organized  whose  members  adopted  uni 
forms  and  rode  together  in  a  body.  Club  ' '  runs ' '  to  near-by 
resorts  became  a  common  form  of  amusement,  while  occa 
sionally  the  more  stalwart  members  of  the  organizations 
undertook  their  "century  runs"  upon  a  single  day.  In 
1880  the  delegates  of  twenty-nine  bicycle  clubs  organized 
the  League  of  American  W7heelmen  which  for  nearly  twenty 


124     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

years  took  a  leading  position  in  the  field  of  amateur  sport. 
The  progress  of  invention  soon  made  bicycling  safer  and 
adapted  it  to  the  use  of  women  by  the  introduction  of  the 
safety  bicycle.  This  machine,  chain-driven  and  with 
wheels  of  equal  size,  appeared  in  the  catalogues  of  1887. 
The  pneumatic  rubber  tire  that  followed  it  in  a  few  more 
years  completed  the  basic  structure  of  the  modern  bicycle. 

Lawn  tennis,  the  only  genuine  rival  of  baseball  and  bicy 
cling  as  American  sports,  was  deliberately  invented  in 
England  and  was  imported  to  America  about  1875.  Tennis 
courts  were  built  on  private  lawns  and  in  the  new  athletic 
clubs,  and  inspired  a  great  increase  in  the  number  of  the 
latter.  A  national  association  was  organized  in  1881  and 
began  its  series  of  annual  tournaments  at  Newport.  A 
women's  national  championship  tournament  appeared  in 
1890,  and  in  the  next  decade  the  American  girl  invaded 
England  and  there  held  her  own  against  all  comers. 

The  new  interest  in  sport  developed  most  rapidly  in  the 
regions  where  the  open  country  life  first  disappeared.  The 
games  were  taken  up  with  an  avidity  that  speedily  made 
them  more  than  an  outlet  for  repressed  spirits,  and  turned 
them  into  a  positive  expression  of  a  new  side  of  American 
life.  They  spread  from  the  cities  where  they  were  indis 
pensable  to  the  small  towns  where  they  were  less  needed. 
Not  only  the  rich  patronized  them,  but  people  of  moderate 
means  enjoyed  them  and  were  able  to  pay  for  them.  City 
governments  provided  them  at  public  cost  for  the  poorer 
classes.  The  prosperity  of  the  eighties  was  enough  to  pro 
vide  a  wide  and  immediate  following  for  sport  or  anything 
else  that  appeared  to  be  worth  while. 

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL  NOTE 

Phineas  T.  Barnum,  Life  of  P.  T.  Barnura  (1855),  was  republished  in 
almost  annual  editions  as  an  advertising  device,  but  is  packed  with  enter 
taining  information  which  is  often  accurate.  Helen  Cody  Wetmore, 
Last  of  the  Great  Scouts:  The  Life  Story  of  Colonel  William  F.  Cody,  "Buffalo 
Bill"  (1889),  and  John  A.  Lomax,  Cowboy  Songs  and  Other  Frontier  Ballads 
(1910),  give  interesting  data  on  the  Far  West.  Theodore  Roosevelt, 
Hunting  Trips  of  a  Ranchman  (1891),  is  one  of  the  best  accounts  of  the 


WILD  WEST  AND  SPORT  125 

West  as  a  playground.  The  literature  of  sport  is  fragmentary  and  unrelia 
ble.  The  files  of  Outing  (beginning  1882  as  the  Wheelman)  provide  the 
best  single  source.  The  New  York  Herald  gives  the  most  detailed  sport 
ing  news.  Other  works  of  value  are  Albert  G.  Spalding,  America's 
National  Game  (1911);  George  B.  Grinnell,  Brief  History  of  the  Boone  and 
Crockett  Club  (1911);  and  F.  L.  Paxson,  "The  Rise  of  Sport,"  in  Mississippi 
Valley  Historical  Review,  September.  1917. 


CHAPTER  XIII 
LABOR  IDEALS 

THE  closing  frontier  removed  the  outlet  that  had  exerted  a 
continuous  influence  for  a  century,  and  the  rise  of  sport  to 
some  extent  provided  a  substitute  method  of  relief;  but 
greater  changes  were  occasioned-by— the_jlisappearance  of 
free  lands  than  those  which  were  simply  of  the  body  and  the 
spirit.  The  ease  with  which  economic  independence  could 
be  obtained  steadily  declined,  and  a  typical  citizen  lost  the 
expectations  hitherto  prevailing  that  he  could  be  financially 
independent  in  his  early  middle  age.  It  became  more  dif 
ficult  to  go  into  agriculture.  Expanding  industry  brought 
into  existence  cities  filled  with  factory  workers  whose  fu 
ture  was  often  bounded  by  the  factory  walls. 

The  labor  problem  took  on  a  new  importance  as  the  hope 
of  individual  independence  weakened.  The  factory  pro- 
Labor  duced  class  consciousness  among  the  workers, 
movement  \V\\Q  could  see  the  sharp  contrast  between  their 
lives  and  those  of  their  employers,  without  seeing  a  way  of 
bettering  theiF  condition  except  by  organization. 

The  contrast  between  the  comforts  and  resources  of  the 
few  and  those  of  the  bulk  of  the  population  became  sharper 
Wages  and  than  it  ever  had  been.  In  earlier  periods  wealth 
prices  ^a(j  been  distributed  with  greater  equality,  and 

there  had  been  fewer  luxuries  or  enjoyments  that  money 
could  buy.  The  new  inventions  and  recreations  were  now 
brought  within  reach  of  the  well-to-do,  and  men  of  means 
found  opportunity  in  the  shifting  industry  to  increase  their 
wealth.  i  It  gave  the  worker  little  satisfaction  to  know  that 
he  was  probably  better  off  than  men  in  his  position  had  ever 
been  before,  i  The  prices  of  commodities  in  1890  were  less 
than  half  those  that  prevailed  in  1865,  and  were  actually 
Id  rer  than  those  of  1860  before  the  Civil  War.  The  declin 
ing  curve  of  prices  after  1865  made  life  easier  for  the  middle 


LABOR  IDEALS  127 

class  and  the  wage-earners  living  on  fixed  incomes.  This 
advantage  was  increased  by  the  fact  that  wages  were  rising, 
those  of  1890  averaging  68  per  cent  above  those  of  1860. 
With  prices  falling  and  wages  rising  on  a  steeper  curve,  the 
wage-earner  had  no  grievance  as  he  looked  behind  him.  A 
His  grievance  lay  before  him,  as  he  looked  into  the  future  and  I 
saw  a  small  fraction  of  the  population  enjoying  advantages 
hitherto  unknown,  whose  attainment  lay  beyond  his  reach. 
The  National  Labor  Union  of  1866  ran  its  course  until  it 
blundered  into  politics  and  died  trying  to  absorb  the  green 
back  doctrine.  The  Knights  of  Labor  represented  the  next 
serious  attempt  to  develop  consciousness  among  working- 
men,  and  to  organize  them  on  a  national  scale.  Its  exist 
ence  for  over  ten  years  as  a  secret  society  of  which  the 
public  was  vaguely  and  nervously  conscious  carried  it 
through  the  panic  of  1873  and  the  period  of  the  railroad 
strikes.  At  the  beginning  of  the  next  decade  it  threw  aside 
the  cloak  of  secrecy  and  became  the  open  spokesman  of  all 
labor.  Its  basis  of  organization  was  the  individual  work 
man,  regardless  of  his  craft,  and  it  admitted  all  workers  but 
lawyers,  bankers,  and  saloon-keepers.  Its  theory  of  organ 
ization  was  a  threat  to  that  of  the  trade  union  that  was  work 
ing  for  solidarity  in  the  various  crafts.  In  1881  a  federation 
of  organized  trade  and  labor  unions  was  organized  in  Pitts 
burgh  to  preserve  the  autonomy  of  local  UT  ion,  and  yet 
provide  a  national  organization.  The  American  Federation 
of  Labor,  as  this  body  came  to  be  known,  had  a  limited  suc 
cess  until  1887,  the  Knights  of  Labor,  meanwhile,  remain 
ing  the  more  prominent  organization.  One  general  activity 
of  the  Knights  of  Labor  was  its  promotion  of  a  statistical 
study  of  the  conditions  of  labor.  In  1891,  said  Senator 
Aldrich  in  the  preface  to  his  report  on  prices,  "there  was  no 
data  in  existence  by  which  the  actual  or  relative  status  of 
wage-earners  could  at  any  time  be  accurately  measured." 
A  National  Bureau  of  Labor  was  created  by  Con-  Bureau 
gress  in  1884,  to  assist  in  this  study,  and  thirty-  of  Labor 
one  States  had  somewhat  similar  bureaus  by  1893.  ^ic 
Knights  desired  to  secure  the  post  of  Commissioner  of  Labor 


128     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

for  their  Grand  Master  Workman  Terence  V.  Powderly,  but 
Arthur  instead  appointed  a  distinguished  economist,  Carroll 
D.  Wright.  The  annual  report  of  tjie  Bureau  became  a 
mine  of  information  on  the  labor  movement.  In  1887  and 
again  in  1894  and  1901,  it  was  devoted  especially  to  a 
summary  of  strikes  and  lockouts.  Increasing  knowledge 
coupled  with  an  actually  improving  status  increased  the  un 
easiness  of  labor  instead  of  moderating  it.  The  panic  of 

1884  left  temporary  depression  in  its  wake  that  distorted 
the  curves  of  wages  and  prices  for  a  brief  interval.      In 

1885  Powderly  discussed  "the  army  of  the  discontented"  in 
the  North  American  Review,  and  believed  that  at  the  moment 
there  were  two  million  workmen  unemployed.     There  ap 
peared  to  be  a  lack  of  correlation  when  farmers  complained 
of  overproduction  and  falling  prices  and  labor  thought  itself 
unable  to  get  along. 

The  prosperity  that  was  insufficient  for  American  work 
men  attracted  immigrants  in  increasing  numbers  after  1878, 
until  in  the  year  1882  they  totaled  788,992.  To  many  of 
these  the  condition  of  labor  in  America  was  better  than 
their  expectation,  but  they  quickly  absorbed  the  discon 
tent  of  organized  American  labor  in  addition  to  alien  ideals 
that  they  imported  and  propagated  in  the  United  States. 

Between  1878  and  1890  the  German  Government  pro 
scribed  the  Socialists,  forcing  them  under  cover  and  into 
Anarchy  secrecy,  and  driving  the  more  enterprising  of 
and  them  to  migration.  Compulsory  military  serv 

ice  increased  the  volume  of  European  emigra 
tion.  The  repressive  policy  of  Russia  bred  anarchy  and 
nihilism  among  the  working-classes  and  further  increased 
the  stream  of  population  attracted  by  the  prosperity  of  the 
United  States.  The  arrival  in  America  of  immigrants  who 
knew  neither  Republican  nor  Democrat,  but  who  avowed 
themselves  to  be  followers  of  Karl  Marx  or  of  the  exponents 
of  anarchy,  jarred  the  complacency  of  the  United  States 
as  it  regarded  American  institutions.  The  names  of  the 
new  schools  of  thought  were  freely  used  without  differentia 
tion.  Violence  and  murder  were  their  earmarks  for  the 


LABOR  IDEALS  129 

public.  The  railroad  strikes  of  1877  caused  dismay  to  those 
who  thought  them  the  beginning  of  a  communistic  revolt. 
From  unshakable  conviction  of  the  merits  of  American  in 
stitutions,  many  persons  had  passed  to  a  panicky  fear  of 
any  individual  however  dissenting  or  unimportant  who  advo 
cated  a  change,  whether  by  evolution  or  by  revolution.  In 
May,  1886,  after  a  period  of  strikes,  egged-on  by  exuberant 
oratory  from  a  group  of  foreign  anarchists,  there  was  a 
riot  in  the  Haymarket  in  Chicago  and  bombs  were  thrown, 
resulting  in  the  death  of  several  policemen.  The  trials  of 
the  anarchists  for  murder  and  the  execution  of  several  of 
them  were  generally  accepted  as  a  proper  defense  of  society. 
The  Haymarket  riots  were  described  by  Leslie  s  as  "the 
most  significant  event  that  has  occurred  in  this  country 
since  Sumter  was  fired  on." 

The  army  of  the  discontented  offered  a  continuous  in 
vitation  to  the  builders  of  new  parties,  still  seeking  for  the 
right  moment  to  unite  the  forces  of  discontent  and  those  of 
reform.  The  New  York  mayoralty  campaign  of  1886  tested 
the  temper  of  the  day. 

Henry  George,  who  was  the  candidate  'of  the  Labor- 
Democracy  for  mayor  of  New  York  in  1886  had  become  a 
national  figure  in  the  seven  years  since  the  publi- 
cation  of  his  Progress  and  Poverty.     The  theory    George  and 
of  the  single  tax  expounded  in  this  volume  be-    laabr°[eg 
came  immediately  popular  in  Jreland,  where  the 
alien  ownership  of  land  was  producing  civil  war!     George 
was  recognized  in  Britain  before  America  would  listen  to 
him.     His  books  were  read  and  his  addresses  were  welcomed* 
by  large  audiences.     The  labor  and  anti-monopoly  forces  in  t 
New  York  made  him  their  candidate  in  September,  1886. 
Patrick  Ford  with  his  Irish  World  brought  him  support 
from  the  New  York  Irish.     He  ha%d  the  open  support  of  Ter 
ence  V.  Powderly,  of  the  Knights  of  Labor,  as  well  as  that  of 
Samuel  Gompers,  of  the  American  Federation  of  Labor. 
The  older  parties  were  driven  to  heroic  exertions  to  save  the 
day.     The  Democratic  Party  nominated  Abram  S.  Hewitt, 
as  strong  a  man  as  it  possessed,  who  had  been  chairman  of 


130     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

the  Democratic  National  Committee  in  1876  and  a  member 
of  Congress,  and  who  was  in  the  abnormal  position  of  being 
at  once  a  wealthy  iron-master  and  a«free-trade  Democrat. 
The  Republican  Party  nominated  Theodore  Roosevelt,  whose 
fighting  qualities  more  than  offset  his  lack  of  years.  Hewitt 
was  elected,  but  the  friends  of  George  believed  that  his  more 
than  sixty  thousand  votes  contained  the  nucleus  of  a  new 
political  party. 

The  United  Labor  Party  was  formed  in  August,  1887,  by 
the  group  that  worked  with  George  the  year  before.  Most 
of  its  members  were  sympathetic  with  the  doctrine  of  the 
single  tax,  but  the  convention  suppressed  the  Socialists  who 
tried  to  capture  the  organization.  Six  months  earlier  there 
had  been  an  industrial  labor  conference  at  Indianapolis, 
dominated  by  Western  reformers  and  the  remnants  of  the 
old  Greenback  organization.  This  convention  thought 
"every  day  brings  tidings  of  the  uprisings  of  the  people" 
and  formed  a  Union  Labor  Party.  Each  group  of  reformers 
hoped  to  bring  about  a  merger  of  agricultural  and  industrial 
labor,  as  the  Greenback  Nationals  had  tried  to  do  in  1878. 

The  depression  after  1884  was  productive  of  complaints 
against  the  existing  order  that  took  form  not  only  in  new  so- 
South-  c^  theories  and  parties,  but  also  in  open  strikes, 
western  Jay  Gould  reduced  the  wages  of  the  shopme'n 
and  machinists  on  his  Wabash  road  early  in 
1885  and  brought  on  a  strike  that  began  in  the  Sedalia 
shops  of  the  Missouri  Pacific  in  March.  Somewhat  to  the 
surprise  of  the  strikers,  they  won  their  demands  with  the 
support  of  the  governors  of  the  Southwestern  States  and 
the  local  railroad  commissioners.  The  men  were  encour 
aged  to  continue  and  complete  their  organization.  District 
assemblies  of  the  Knights  of  Labor  appeared  throughout 
the  Missouri  Pacific  system,  and  in  March,  1886,  local 
assemblies  of  the  Knights  under  the  leadership  of  Martin 
Irons  renewed  the  warfare.  The  strike  was  disavowed  by 
the  Knights  of  Labor,  which  as  an  organization  did  business 
in  other  ways.  There  was,  however,  no  means  by  which 
the  national  organization  could  control  the  irregular  acts 


LABOR  IDEALS  131 

of  its  local  assemblies,  and  Irons  for  a  time  became  a  dic 
tator  in  the  Southwest.  Jay  Gould  was  at  the  height  of  his 
unpopularity  and  the  strikers  believed  that  because  of  this 
public  sympathy  would  side  with  them. 

Gould  defeated  the  hopes  of  the  strikers  by  turning  public 
sympathy  against  them.  Instead  of  trying  to  run  his  trains, 
he  brought  them  back  to  the  yards,  when  the  strikers  did 
not  burn  them  on  the  way,  and  left  them  there.  Within 
a  day  or  two  southern  Kansas  and  the  region  southwest  of  it 
realized  their  dependence  upon  continued  freight  service. 
Coal  and  food  ran  low.  Political  pressure  was  brought  upon 
the  governors  to  end  the  strike,  wrhile  Powderly  disavowed 
it.  The  outlaw  assemblies  were  held  responsible  for  the 
disorder,  while  the  strike  out  of  which  it  grew  was  declared 
by  the  Commissioner  of  Labor  to  be  ill-judged  and  without 
proper  cause.  It  was  completely  lost. 

The  Knights  of  Labor  declined  in  strength  and  popularity 
after  the  Missouri  Pacific  strike.  Its  attempt  at  solidarity 
of  all  labor  antagonized  the  leaders  of  the  trades.  The 
American  Federation  began  to  grow  rapidly,  encouraging 
its  member  unions  to  develop  themselves  as  far  as  possible,, 
and  becoming  itself  a  clearing-house  for  the  common  needs 
of  labor.  The  organization  of  1881  was  revised  in  1886. 

The  renewed  uneasiness  of  labor  and  reform,  instead  of 
producing  a  demand  for  ua  strong  President"  as  it  did  in 
1878,  stimulated  an  examination  of  the  workings    potter 
of  American  government.     The  one  hundredth    Bellamy, 
anniversary  of  the  Federal  Constitution,  cele-  , 
brated  in  1889,  became  the  occasion  of  a  general  discussion 
of  the  changes  in  society.     During  these  ceremonies  Bishop 
Henry  C.  Potter  preached  a  scathing  sermon  upon  the  de 
cay  in  morals  to  a  congregation  that  included  the  Presi 
dent!  Edward  Bellamy  wrote  a  romance,  Looking  Backward 
(1889),  in  which  his  hero  was  thrown  into  a  prolonged 
slumber  on  Memorial  Day,  1887,  to  awake  in  the  year  2000, 
and  to  wonder  at  the  new  society.     Bellamy  followed  the 
trend  to  monopoly  to  its  logical  fullness,  and  described  an 
Arcadia  of  state  socialism.      His  tale  appealed  to  spirits 


132     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

discontented  with  the  realities  of  life,  and  there  came  a 
little  crop  of  Bellamistic  societies,  whose  members  talked  of 
forming  communities  in  which  to  live  a  communistic  life. 
A  different  picture  drawn  from  the  same  society  was  given 
by  Paul  Leicester  Ford  in  The  Honorable  Peter  Stirling 
(1894),  wno  described  the  foundations  of  the  power  of  the 
city  boss  and  used  episodes  that  made  the  life  of  his  hero 
somewhat  resemble  that  of  Grover  Cleveland. 

While  politicians,  reformers,  and  labor  organizers  were 
working  on  the  problems  of  the  city  wage-earner,  the  daily 
City-life  life  of  that  individual  was  an  object  of  wide 
problems  concern.  The  cities  of  the  eighties  were  piled 
helter-skelter  within  the  limits  of  what  had  been  hardly 
more  than  country  towns.  The  census  of  the  United  States 
shows  25  cities  of  fifty  thousand  in  1870,  35  in  1880,  and  58 
in  1890.  New  York  City  in  these  twenty  years  increased 
from  942,292  to  1,515,301,  Philadelphia  from  674,022  to 
1,046,964,  Chicago  from  298,977  to  1,099,850.  The 'in 
crease  in  houses  was  in  every  case  less  rapid  than  that  in 
city  population.  The  poorer  newcomers  crowded  in  tene 
ments,  and  it  was  small  wonder  that  the  city  boss,  with  his 
annual  free  picnic  for  his  constituents,  could  win  their 
hearts  and  sway  their  votes.  The  city  political  organiza 
tions  acquired  a  degree  of  cohesion  hitherto  unknown  in 
American  politics,  and  their  steadiness  gave  to  the  national 
party  organizations  an  ability  to  resist  the  disintegrating 
influences  of  reform.  The  cities  became  the  scene  of  easy 
political  corruption.  On  every  hand  the  needs  of  the  com 
munity  called  for  water  companies,  gas  companies,  electric 
lighting,  rapid  transit,  and  railroad  terminals.  The  fran 
chises  of  the  community  possessed  great  value  for  promoters 
who  could  gain  possession  of  them,  and  the  city  councils  in 
the  presence  of  these  agents  of  business  were  under  constant 
pressure  to  betray  the  interests  of  the  people. 

The  condition  of  the  less  fortunate  members  of  society 
crowded  in  the  city  slums  constituted  a  two-edged  problem. 
Their  misery  and  lack  of  opportunity  appealed  to  the  com 
passion  of  every  one  who  knew  them,  while  the  future  of 


LABOR  IDEALS  133 

society  in  the  hands  of  voters  who  had  grown  to  manhood 
amid  the  conditions  of  the  slums  was  a  matter  of  deep  con 
cern.  When  Jacob  Riis  published  in  1890  the  record  of  his 
observations  as  a  journalist  on  the  East  Side  in  New  York 
under  the  title  How  the  Other  Half  Lives,  he  aroused  both 
amazement  and  incredulity. 

The  conditions  arising  from  modern  city  congestion  were 
experienced  in  Europe  earlier  than  in  the  United  States 
and  were  approached  from  both  standpoints,  of  Social 
the  body  and  of  the  soul.  The  spasmodic  re-  workers 
vival  work  conducted  with  effect  by  Moody  and  Sankey  in 
the  later  seventies  in  New  York  was  paralleled  by  the  per 
manent  revival  work  of  the  Salvation  Army.  This  organiza 
tion  beginning  in  the  English  slums  in  1865  stuck  persist 
ently  to  its  task.  The  first  edition  of  its  War  Cry  appeared 
in  1879.  Its  activities  were  extended  to  the  United  States, 
and  carried  on  amid  jeers  and  misunderstandings,  but  "the 
hallelujah  circus"  lasted  in  spite  of  the  sneers. 

The  name  of  Arnold  Toynbee  is  connected  with  the  move 
ment  that  began  in  England  to  take  lay  workers  into  the 
slums  and  to  help  their  inhabitants  by  methods  other  than 
religious.  The  interest  of  Toynbee  in  the  work  was  aroused 
in  part  by  the  English  lectures  of  Henry  George.  After  his 
death  Toynbee  Hall  was  founded  in  the  East  End  of  Lon 
don,  and  here  a  group  of  university  men  went  into  the  re 
gion  of  the  notorious  White  Chapel  Road  like  any  other 
missionaries  into  a  strange  society. 

The  settlement  idea  was  brought  to  America  after  the 
opening  of  Toynbee  Hall.  Americans  who  would  have 
denied  the  existence  of  a  need  looked  around  them  and 
were  frightened  by  what  they  saw.  The  New  York  Col 
lege  Settlement  was  opened  in  the  fall  of  1889;  a  few  days 
after  it  a  group  of  Western  college  women,  with  Jane  Ad- 
dams  at  their  head,  opened  Hull  House  in  Chicago.  Lillian 
D.  Wald,  one  of  the  early  group  of  workers  in  New  York, 
has  described  in  autobiographic  form  The  House  on  Henry 
Street  (1915),  with  which  she  was  connected .  The  new  ideas 
spread  rapidly,  and  before  the  end  of  the  century  more 


134     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

than  a  hundred  settlements  of  similar  character  had  been 
created  to  spread  the  happiness  of  modern  life  more  uni 
formly  among  the  people. 

Charity  was  refounded  upon  a  new  theory.  The  giving 
to  others  for  the  benefit  of  the  giver  appeared  to  be  inade 
quate.  The  interest  of  society  in  the  welfare  of  all  its  mem 
bers  and  in  being  protected  against  the  underdevelopment 
of  any  of  them  was  the  foundation  of  new  movements  for 
charity  organization  and  cooperation  among  the  charitable 
agencies.  The  new  science  of  sociology  was  studied  for  the 
light  it  might  throw  upon  these  problems.  Social  workers 
found  themselves  working  for  the  same  ends  as  the  professed 
advocates  of  labor.  In  both  groups  there  was  steady  devel 
opment  of  a  conviction  that  democracy  on  the  old  basis  had 
had  its  day  with  the  passing  of  the  rural  ideal,  and  that 
under  the  conditions  of  modern  industry  democratic  free 
dom  of  opportunity  would  be  lost  unless  the  people  as  a 
whole  intervened  to  save  themselves  as  individuals.  By 
1890  the  United  States  was  no  longer  a  nation  of  relative 
equality,  but  showed  all  the  signs  of  approaching  social 
stratification.  The  degree  with  which  this  fact  was  unrec 
ognized  by  the  spokesmen  of  reform  is  one  of  the  measures 
of  the  survival  of  the  belief  m  the  doctrine  of  equal  op 
portunity. 

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL  NOTE 

John  R.  Commons,  Documentary  History  of  American  Industrial  Society 
(1911),  is  supplemented  by  his  cooperative  History  of  Labor  in  the  United 
States  (1918).  Contemporary  narratives  are  Terence  V.  Powderly, 
Thirty  Years  of  Labor  (1889),  and  George  E.  McNeill,  The  Labor  Movement 
(1887).  There  is  much  testimony  on  labor  conditions  in  the  Report  of  the 
Industrial  Commission  (1900-02).  The  Aldrich  Reports,  compiled  1892- 
93,  give  detailed  statistics  on  wages  and  prices  and  are  printed  in  52d 
Cong.,  ist  Sess.,  Sen.  Rep.  986,  and  52d  Cong.,  2d  Sess.,  Sen.  Rep.  1394. 
There  is  an  exhaustive  report  on  immigration  in  49th  Cong.,  2d  Sess., 
House  Ex.  Doc.  157.  Valuable  biographies  are  Henry  George,  Life  of 
Henry  George  (1904);  Lillian  D.  Wald,  The  House  on  Henry  Street  (1915); 
and  Jane  Addams,  Twenty  Years  at  Hull  House  (1910). 


CHAPTER  XIV 

THE  ELECTION  OF  1 888 

AT  no  time  between  1885  and  1889  did  Grover  Cleveland 
have  both  houses  of  Congress  in  political  agreement  with 
him.  The  Democrats  failed  to  gain  the  Senate  in  1884,  and 
repeated  the  failure  in  1886.  The  President  never  received 
the  prestige  that  comes  from  the  enactment  of  party  meas 
ures.  His  own  party  came  to  regard  him  as  less  than  a 
success,  while  the  Republicans  viewed  him  as  the  obstacle 
between  themselves  and  full  control  of  the  Government. 
His  tendency  to  rely  upon  his  own  judgment  increased  with 
his  isolation.  In  December,  1887,  he  took  all  parties  by 
surprise  by  devoting  the  whole  of  his  annual  message  to 
the  need  for  tariff  reform. 

The  attack  upon  the  protective  tariff  system  advanced 
along  three  lines  after  the  chance  injection  of  the  issue  into   ^ 
the  canvass  of  1880,  and  the  failure  of  Congress,    The  tariff 
under  Arthur,  really  to  revise  it.      The  social    lssue 
reformers  denounced  it  as  class  legislation  that  gave  special 
privileges  to  the  monopolies  that  were  already  menacing. 
Political  economists,  filled  with  the  theories  of  Adam  Smith, 
criticized  it  as  an  improper  interference  with  free  trade  c 
among  the  nations.     Practical  politicians  saw  in  it  the  cause 
for  a  swelling  surplus  in  the  National  Treasury  that  either  ^ 
tempted  Congress  into  extravagance  or  took  from  the  people 
funds  not  needed  for  the  purposes  of  government.     Cleve 
land  was  impressed  by  all  three  arguments,  but  most  of  all 
by  the  last.      In  his  third  annual  message  he  called  Con 
gress  to  its^duty  and  his  party  to  leadership,  in  cutting  down 
the  revenues  to  the  amount  needed  to  maintain  the  Gov-  ' 
ernment. 

Many  of  the  wisest  of  the  tariff  reformers  advised  against 
an  attempt  at  reduction  at  this  time.  There  was  no  pros 
pect  that  a  bill  could  be  passed  against  the  opposition  of  a 


136    RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

Republican  Senate.  George  W.  Curtis,  Carl  Schurz,  and 
E.  L.  Godkin  believed  that  it  was  more  important  to  reelect 
Cleveland  in  1888  than  to  force  the  tariff  issue  in  1887,  and 
feared  that  the  result  of  Cleveland's  act  would  be  to  split 
the  Democrats  and  improve  the  fighting  spirit  of  the  Re 
publicans.  Neither  free  trade  nor  tariff  reform  was  accepted 
unanimously  in  the  Democratic  Party,  which  had  recog 
nized  the  protectionist  Randall  as  its  parliamentary  leader 
until  1883. 

The  tariff  reform  message  of  Cleveland  was  accepted  by 
the  Republican  leaders  as  a  call  to  battle.  James  G.  Elaine 
was  abroad  when  it  was  read,  but  instantly  an  interview 
with  him  at  Paris  appeared  in  which  he  denounced  free 
trade.  The  Republican  National  Committee  met  in  Wash 
ington  on  December  8,  1887,  to  issue  the  call  for  its  next 
convention.  The  committeemen  welcomed  the  issue  as 
one  upon  which  they  were  ready  to  fight,  and  the  chairman, 
B.  F.  Jones,  announced  that  Elaine  could  have  the  nomina 
tion  if  he  wanted  it.  The  aggressive  in  the  tariff  debate  had 
been  conducted  by  Democrats  thus  far.  It  was  now  seized 
by  Republicans,  who  held  it  for  the  next  ten  years. 

Neo-Republicanism  was  a  name  suggested  for  the  Re 
publican  Party  as  its  leaders  took  up  the  movement  for 
extreme  protection,  and  advanced  under  the  arguments 
formulated  by  Henry  Clay  for  the  American  system. 
Throughout  the  debate  over  the  tariff  of  1883  the  party 
leaders  had  conceded  that  the  tariff  as  it  existed  was  inde 
fensible.  There  was  no  excuse  for  the  "accidental"  duties 
and  it  was  imperative  to  reduce  the  surplus.  The  change 
in  party  attitude  visible  by  1888  was  a  natural  result  of  the 
industrial  changes  since  the  panic  of  1873,  and  the  fall  of 
prices. 

Over-production  and  falling  prices  were  among  the  results 
of  railroad  construction  and  mechanical  invention.  The 
welfare  of  the  wage-earner  was  improved;  his  wages  were 
increased  while  prices  fell.  But  the  producing  classes, 
farmers  and  manufacturers,  watched  with  regret  the  de 
clining  market  value  of  their  output,  and  listened  readily 


THE  ELECTION  OF  1888  137 

to  the  suggestions  for  raising  prices.  The  manufacturer 
connected  his  loss  with  European  competition.  When 
London  Punch  printed  a  cartoon  describing  Cleveland  as 
"English,  quite  English,  you  know,"  on  account  of  his  tariff 
reform  ideas,  it  strengthened  the  manufacturers'  belief  that 
free  trade  was  un-American,  and  that  the  route  to  greater  / 
prosperity  lay  through  protection.  When  Cleveland  urged 
a  tariff  policy  whose  consequence  would  be  to  encourage 
the  importation  of  more  foreign  goods,  through  lower 
duties,  the  manufacturers  turned  to  their  own  party  and 
financed  the  fight  against  him.  Most  of  them  lived  in  the 
North  and  East,  and  belonged  to  the  party  that  was  dom 
inant  in  that  region.  The  voice  of  the  Republican  tariff 
reformers  was  drowned  by  the  noise  of  Republican  pro 
tectionists.  When  a  New  York  City  convention  nominated 
Roosevelt  for  mayor  in  1886,  a  voice  was  raised  against 
him  charging  that  he  had  belonged  to  a  college  free  trade 
club.  Chauncey  M.  Depew,  who  presided,  anointed  the 
sore  spot  with  a  jest,  and  defended  the  young  man's  privi 
lege  to  make  mistakes  and  repent  them.  The  Republican 
party  organization  was  swung  from  apology  for  the  tariff 
and  promise  of  amendment  to  its  affirmative  advocacy. 

Roger^  Q.  Mills,  of  Texas,  appointed  chairman  of  the 
House  Committee  on  Ways  and  Means  by  Speaker  Car 
lisle,  was  a  tariff  reformer,  and  approached,  in  his  theoreti 
cal  views,  what  the  tariff  advocates  described  as  free  trade. 
Under  his  direction  the  Democratic  majority  of  the  com 
mittee  prepared  a  tariff  bill  that  contemplated  a  reduction 
of  $50,000,000  in  the  customs  receipts.  The  House  began 
to  debate  it  in  April,  1888,  and  Mills's  attack  upon  the  ex 
isting  tariff  situation  as  the  result  of  Republican  class  leg 
islation  was  met  by  William  McKinley,  of  Ohio.  McKin- 
ley  was  now  minority  leader  on  the  committee,  and  was 
supported  by  Thomas  B.  Reed  and  "Pig  Iron"  Kelley,  of 
Pennsylvania,  in  denouncing  the  bill  as  a  "star  chamber" 
measure  which  the  majority  members  had  drawn  up  in 
secret.  "Neither  employers  nor  employed  could  view 
with  indifference  the  hasty  manner  in  which  modification 


138     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

of  a  protective  tariff,  upon  which  depended  their  fortunes 
and  their  daily  earnings,  was  made  by  men  fitted  neither 
by  association  nor  experience  for  the  task,"  wrote  Walker 
Blaine  in  the  North  American  Review.  The  six  Southerners 
among  the  eight  Democratic  members  of  the  committee 
were  charged  with  a  sectional  attack  upon  the  industrial 
life  of  the  nation.  Before  the  tariff  passed  the  House,  the 
national  conventions  were  held  to  nominate  candidates  for 
the  approaching  election. 

The  Democratic  Convention  met  in  St.  Louis  on  June 
5,  1888,  with  the  Administration  forces  in  control,  though 
Party  not  able  to  dominate  it  in  every  way.  Cleve- 

conventions  jancj  was  renominated  without  serious  dissent, 
in  spite  of  the  opposition  from  his  own  State,  where  Gov 
ernor  David  B.  Hill  had  gained  control  of  the  Democratic 
machine  and  was  using  it  for  his  own  purposes.  Allen  G. 
Thurman  was  nominated  for  Vice-President,  Hendricks 
having  died  in  office.  Cleveland  was  able  to  secure  the 
election  of  his  candidate  for  chairman  of  the  convention, 
Patrick  Collins,  of  Boston,  a  prominent  Irish  leader  wrjose 
influence  offset  that  of  Patrick  Ford  and  Patrick  Egan  wjio 
had  led  many  Irish-Americans  to  Blaine  in  1884.'  He  was 
not  able  to  force  the  convention  to  endorse  the  Mills  Bill 
by  name,  although  his  friends  overrode  the  objections  of 
the  Democratic  protectionists,  and  adopted  a  plank  ap 
proving  tariff  revision.  "N 

The  Republican  Party  convened  at  Chicago  two  weeks 
after  the  Democratic  meeting,  with  the  new  spirit  of  protec 
tion  in  the  ascendant,  and  with  no  leader  in  sight  except 
James  G.  Blaine.  In  the  discussion  of  the  tariff  since  the 
preceding  December,  Blaine  had  led  the  attack  from  Eu 
rope,  and  he  was  still  abroad  when  the  convention  met.  In 
1884  he  had  embarrassed  his  campaign  at  the  last  moment 
by  accepting  a  banquet  at  Delmonico's  from  Astor,  Sage, 
Gould,  and  other  money  kings.  He  was  now  in  Scotland  on 
a  coaching  trip  with  Andrew  Carnegie,  from  whose  resi 
dence  he  kept  up  a  cable  correspondence  with  his  friends  in 
the  Chicago  Convention.  He  was  not  the  most  available 


THE  ELECTION  OF  1 888  139 

candidate,  and  knew  it.  The  Mugwump  charges,  anent 
the  Mulligan  letters  and  his  conduct  as  Speaker  had  not 
been  silenced,  and  were  certain  to  break  out  again  if  he 
should  resume  his  candidacy.  His  friends,  loyal  to  the  end, 
were  not  ready  to  concede  this,  and  held  the  convention  in 
session  into  its  second  week  while  they  clung  to  the  hope 
that  he  would  consent  to  run. 

With  Elaine  eliminated,  the  Republican  field  was  wide 
open.  John  Sherman,  with  his  usual  support  of  Southern 
delegates,  was  still  ambitious;  but  there  was  no  unanimity 
among  his  Ohio  colleagues,  and  both  Foraker  and  McKinley 
were  mentioned  in  rivalry  to  him.  New  York  supported 
a  favorite  son  for  a  time,  in  the  person  of  Chauncey  M. 
Depew.  Allison,  of  Iowa,  and  Alger,  of  Michigan,  were  both 
active  aspirants;  Indiana  furnished  Walter  Q.  Gresham 
and  Benjamin  Harrison. 

The  Gresham  candidacy  was  the  hope  of  the  surviving 
Mugwumps,  who  had  made  no  attempt  to  perpetuate  a 
party  organization,  and  who  had  generally  reverted  to  their 
Republican  allegiance  after  1884.  Some  had  remained 
with  the  Democrats,  attracted  by  Cleveland's  leadership 
against  the  tariff,  but  their  number  was  small  because  it 
was  their  general  impression  that  in  administering  the  civil 
service  Cleveland  had  done  less  well  than  they  expected, 
and  many  of  them  regarded  him  as  a  failure.  The  attitude 
of  Gresham  against  the  tariff  drew  to  him  such  Republicans 
as  regretted  the  new  party  trend. 

As  the  convention  week  dragged  on,  Harrison  grew  in 
strength,  but  the  week-end  passed  without  a  choice.  He 
received  the  nomination  on  the  following  Mon-  Benjamin 
day,  after  Elaine  had  repeated  his  refusal  to  Harrison 
run,  and  had  advised  his  friends  to  turn  their  support  to 
Harrison.  Levi  P.  Morton,  of  New  York,  was  nominated 
with  him.  "Harrison  lived  near  the  center  of  population 
and  was  almost  a  composite  photograph  of  the  nation's 
want,"  wrote  one  of  his  admirers.  "He  was  neither 
Granger  nor  anti-Granger.  He  had  good  running  qualities 
of  another  kind.  He  had  a  home  and  cherished  it.  He  had 


140     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

all  the  homely  qualities  which  are  the  best  gift  to  an  Ameri 
can  who  seeks  for  office  by  the  popular  vote.  He  had  a 
good  record.  He  had  an  ancestry,  but  did  not  depend  on 
it."  With  the  scandals  of  1884  in  view  the  nomination  of 
Harrison  was  an  insurance  policy  for  the  party.  His  per 
sonal  life  was  above  any  reproach;  his  party  record  as  Sena 
tor  was  good;  he  stood  high  in  one  of  the  most  doubtful 
States;  and  his  grandfather,  William  Henry  Harrison,  still 
aroused  affections  in  the  Northwest  that  resembled  those 
for  Andrew  Jackson. 

The  Republican  platform  was  written  by  the  advocates  of 
high  protection  in  spite  of  protests  from  the  West  that  the 
Canvass  Mississippi  Valley  was  not  devoted  to  it.  The 
of  1888  Western  view,  summed  up  in  the  Chicago  Trib 
une,  a  low  tariff,  Republican  paper,  stated  the  opinion: 

"Protection,  in  a  nutshell,  means 

A  right  for  certain  classes; 
A  little  law  that  intervenes 

To  help  them  rob  the  masses. 
The  rich  may  put  their  prices  high; 
The  poor  shall  be  compelled  to  buy." 

The  manufacturers  had  gained  control  of  the  Republican 
party  organization,  and  upon  their  recommendation  a  little 
later  the  Republican  National  Committee  chose  Senator 
Matthew  Stanley  Quay  as  chairman  and  campaign  manager. 
The  Mills  Bill  served  as  a  convenient  text  until  the  can 
vass  was  nearly  over.  It  was  passed  by  the  House  during 
July  and  in  the  Senate  was  given  open  hearings  by  the  Com 
mittee  on  Finance.  At  these  hearings  manufacturers  who 
objected  to  any  lowering  of  the  tariff  rates  brought  forward 
their  testimony.  The  advocates  of  reduction,  less  well  or 
ganized,  made  a  less  important  showing  than  the  manu 
facturers.  The  open  hearings  were  emphasized  by  Republi 
cans  in  contrast  to  the  secrecy  in  which  the  original  bill  had 
been  prepared.  A  few  days  before  election  the  hearings  on 
the  bill  were  dropped,  and  Congress  adjourned  to  partici 
pate  in  the  closing  days  of  the  campaign.  No  real  reduction 
had  been  possible  with  the  Republican  Party  in  control  of 


THE  ELECTION  OF  1888  141 

the  Senate;  the  Democratic  measure  merely  provided  a 
text  for  partisan  debate. 

The  attack  upon  the  Democratic  Party  for  its  failure  to 
carry  out  the  reforms  it  promised  produced  new  discussions 
of  the  civil  service.  Republican  critics  quoted  the  Demo 
cratic  platforms  since  1872  with  their  pledges  of  devotion  to 
civil  service  reform.  The  party  in  office  had  been  beset  with 
demands  for  jobs  from  Democrats  who  had  had  no  chance  to 
enjoy  the  federal  patronage  since  1860.  Cleveland  had  up-, 
held  the  work  of  the  Civil  Service  Commission,  and  had  in 
creased  the  number  of  offices  in  the  classified  civil  service. 
He  had,  however,  taken  the  view  that  outside  this  service 
there  were  many  officers  who  "were  appointed  solely  on 
partisan  grounds"  and  who  had  "forfeited  all  just  claim  to 
retention,  because  they  have  used  their  places  for  party  pur 
poses  in  disregard  to  their  duty  to  the  people,  and  because, 
instead  of  being  decent  public  servants,  they  have  proved 
themselves  offensive  partisans  and  unscrupulous  manipu 
lators  of  local  party  management."  Postmaster-General 
Vilas  had  been  permitted  to  remove  large  numbers  of 
Republican  postmasters  in  the  old  fashion. 

The  echoes  of  the  Civil  War  were  not  absent  during  the 
debate,  although  they  were  subsiding  every  year.  The 
former  Confederates  in  Cleveland's  Cabinet  aroused  some 
resentment,  and  the  charge  was  often  made  that  the  Demo 
cratic  Government  was  under  the  control  of  the  "rebel 
brigadiers."  It  was  held  that  in  his  pension  vetoes  Cleve 
land  "showed  lack  of  sympathy  with  the  pensioners";  and 
he  gave  offense  "to  the  patriotic  public  sentiment  of  the 
country  in  going  fishing  on  Decoration  Day."  Worse 
than  this  he  ordered  the  return  to  the  Southern  States  of 
battle-flags  captured  during  the  Civil  War.  It  was  too 
early  for  the  veterans  of  that  struggle  to  accept  this  with 
complacency,  and  one  of  them,  Joseph  B.  Foraker,  strength 
ened  his  campaign  for  governor  in  Ohio  in  1887  by  m's  public 
declaration  that  "no  rebel  flags  will  be  surrendered  while  I 
am  governor." 

The  United  States,  as  usual,  was  nearly  evenly  divided 


142     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

upon  the  issues.  In  the  three  preceding  elections  the  vic 
torious  candidates  had  been  chosen  by  slight  popular  ma 
jorities.  Indiana  and  Ohio  had  now  ceased  to  hold  their 
State  elections  earlier  than  the  national  election,  and  the 
country  accordingly  lacked  these  indices  to  the  temper  of 
the  times.  Indiana  remained,  however,  a  doubtful  State, 
which  both  parties  made  great  efforts  to  carry.  The  Re 
publican  campaign  treasurer,  W.  W.  Dudley,  received  wide 
notoriety  from  a  letter  in  which  he  was  alleged  to  have  ad 
vised  local  workers  in  Indiana  to  organize  their  "floating 
voters"  in  "blocks  of  five"  and  to  vote  them  under  the  eye 
of  trustworthy  lieutenants.  The  letter  was  denounced  as 
bogus,  but  seems  at  least  to  be  typical  of  party  methods. 

The  British  Minister  at  Washington,  Sir  Lionel  Sackville- 
West,  fell  into  a  trap  set  for  him  by  a  Republican  worker. 
A  letter  written  to  him  by  an  alleged  naturalized  English 
man  who  signed  himself  Murchison  asked  him  to  advise 
the  writer  how  he  might  best  vote  so  as  to  make  his  vote 
of  use  to  Great  Britain.  With  an  indiscretion  matched 
only  by  Elaine's  failure  to  notice  the  remark  of  Dr.  Bur- 
chard,  he  replied  that  a  vote  for  Cleveland  would  support 
the  British  policy  of  free  trade.  His  act  became  known 
in  October,  and  he  was  immediately  dismissed  as  persona 
non  grata,  but  no  dismissal  could  overcome  the  injury  of 
his  remark.  Free  trade  was  denounced  as  un-American 
and  pro-British.  British  gold  was  alleged  to  be  behind  the 
Democratic  Party,  and  votes  were  turned  against  the  Demo 
cratic  ticket. 

Benjamin  Harrison  was  elected  on  November  6,  1888, 
and  with  him  there  was  chosen  a  Congress  Republican  in 
both  its  branches.  The  election  was  so  close,  however,  that 
the  victor  received  less  than  a  majority  of  the  votes  cast; 
but  the  Cleveland  plurality  was  wasted  on  huge  majori 
ties  in  Democratic  States,  while  the  Harrison  minority  was 
widely  distributed  so  that  it  carried  the  electoral  college. 
In  New  York  the  presidential  vote  was  given  to  Harrison, 
while  Cleveland's  Democratic  rival,  David  B.  Hill,  was 
chosen  as  governor,  under  circumstances  that  suggested  a 


THE  ELECTION  OF  1888  143 

corrupt  bargain  between  the  local  Democratic  and  Republi 
can  State  machines. 

The  scandals  of  Indiana  and  New  York,  whether  the  in 
dividuals  mentioned  were  guilty  as  charged  or  not,  drew  at 
tention  to  a  condition  in  politics  in  grievous  need  of  improve 
ment.  In  most  States  all  of  the  machinery  used  in  making 
nominations  for  office  was  outside  the  law,  and  was  operated 
by  party  organizations  with  no  penalties  for  corruption  and 
no  remedy  for  the  cheated  party  members.  Even  the  pro 
vision  of  ballots  to  be  used  upon  election  day  was  a  private 
matter,  and  the  State  began  its  control  at  the  ballot-box  in 
which  these  were  deposited.  It  was  possible  to  buy  votes, 
whether  in  "blocks  of  five "  or  otherwise,  to  place  the  desired 
ballot  in' the  hands  of  voters,  and  to  require  them  to  hold 
the  ballot  so  that  it  might  be  visible  to  the  watcher  at  the 
polls  until  it  was  safely  deposited  in  the  ballot-box.  It 
was  possible  by  careful  watching  to  observe  which  ticket  was 
voted  by  any  voter.  Democrats  alleged  that  in  manufactur 
ing  towns  the  mill-owners  compelled  their  employees  to  vote 
the  Republican  ticket  under  penalty  of  dismissal. 

The  abuses  in  the  election  system  became  more  visible  in 
these  elections  in  which  the  vote  was  nearly  evenly  divided 
and  in  which  elections  turned  largely  upon  party  Secret 
organization  and  political  tricks.  "We  should  ballot 
so  shape  our  governmental  system,"  wrote  Theodore  Roose 
velt  in  the  Century  in  November,  1886,  "that  the  action  re 
quired  by  the  voters  should  be  as  simple  and  direct  as  possi 
ble,  and  should  not  need  to  be  taken  any  more  often  than  is 
necessary.  Governmental  power  should  be  concentrated  in 
the  hands  of  a  very  few  men,  who  would  be  so  conspicuous 
that  no  citizen  could  help  knowing  all  about  them ;  and  the 
elections  should  not  come  too  frequently."  A  movement 
for  a  secret  ballot,  which  the  State  instead  of  the  party 
should  provide,  made  its  appearance  about  1885.  Massa 
chusetts  passed  such  a  bill  in  1888  and  Governor  Hill  vetoed 
one  in  New  York  in  the  same  year.  The  system  had  orig 
inated  in  Australia  thirty  years  earlier  and  had  spread  thence 
into  England,  and  now  appealed  to  the  United  States  as  a 


144     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

means  of  elevating  the  standards  of  elections.  The  action 
of  Massachusetts  was  followed  by  nine  other  States  in  1889, 
by  seven  more  in  1890,  and  by  eighteen  in  1891.  Before  the 
next  presidential  election  the  reform  was  national  in  its  scope 
and  neither  the  purchase  of  votes  nor  the  intimidation  of 
voters  ever  recurred  on  the  scale  in  which  they  existed  be 
fore  the  adoption  of  the  Australian  ballot. 

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL  NOTE 

The  tariff  histories  mentioned  under  Chapter  VIII,  above,  continue  to 
be  of  use.  William  L.  Wilson,  The  National  Democratic  Party  (1888),  is  a 
partisan  compilation,  but  has  considerable  value  in  the  absence  of  more 
serious  histories  of  parties.  Joseph  B.  Foraker,  Notes  of  a  Busy  Life  (1916), 
prints  numerous  letters  relating  to  this  campaign,  and  should  be  read  in 
connection  with  Charles  S.  Olcott,  Life  of  William  McKinley  (1916). 


CHAPTER  XV 

PROTECTION 

JAMES  G.  ELAINE  was  more  prominent  during  the  canvass 
of  1888  than  was  Benjamin  Harrison,  the  candidate,  and 
received  the  reward  of  his  unquestioned  party  Harrison's 
leadership  in  the  appointment  as  Secretary  of  Cabmet 
State.  In  the  management  of  the  campaign  it  was  clear 
that  Republican  manufacturers  were  providing  the  cam 
paign  funds  and  that  they  expected  action  from  the  new 
Government  in  the  direction  of  the  extension  of  the  pro 
tective  system.  The  rest  of  the  Cabinet  was  made  up  of 
party  wrorkers  loyal  to  protection.  William  L.  Windom 
was  made  Secretary  of  the  Treasury,  although  Thomas  C. 
Platt  declared  the  post  had  been  promised  to  him.  Most 
of  the  other  members  were  unknowrn  in  national  affairs; 
but  one,  John  Wanamaker,  of  Philadelphia,  who  was  ap 
pointed  Postmaster-General,  occasioned  considerable  remon 
strance.  Wanamaker  was  described  by  Harper's  Weekly  as 
the  purveyor  of  money  to  be  spent  by  Quay  and  Dudley. 
In  the  closing  days  of  the  canvass  he  was  believed  to  have 
raised  nearly  four  hundred  thousand  dollars  for  the  party 
treasury,  extracting  the  funds  from  his  manufacturing  ac 
quaintances  who  feared  interference  with  their  tariff  rates. 
The  editor  of  the  New  York  Tribune  was  made  Minister  to 
France  and  Corporal  Tanner  was  made  Commissioner  of 
Pensions. 

The  election  of  1888  resulted  in  Republican  majorities 
in  both  houses  in  the  Fifty-First  Congress,  but  left  the 
majorities  so  small  that  party  business  could  be 
transacted  only  in  case  it  was  possible  to  keep 
the  whole  majority  continually  at  work.  In  Fifty-F"" 
the  Senate  with  forty-seven  Republicans  against 
thirty-seven  Democrats  the  margin  was  large  enough  for 
safe  operation.  In  the  House  of  Representatives,  with  one 


146     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

hundred  and  seventy  votes  the  Republicans  possessed  only 
five  more  than  the  absolute  majority  necessary  to  produce  a 
quorum.  I'ncler  the  practice  in  the  House  the  quorum  was 
determined  by  the  number  of  members  who  answered  on 
a  roll-call.  When  the  Mills  Bill  was  introduced  in  Novem 
ber,  1888,  the  Republican  members,  under  the  leadership  of 
Thomas  B.  Reed,  of  Maine,  sat  silently  in  their  seats  during 
the  roll-call  and  compelled  the  Democrats  to  provide  the 
whole  quorum  out  of  their  own  membership  before  they 
could  proceed  to  business.  If  this  practice  were  now  turned 
against  the  Republican  majority  the  end  result  would  be  im 
potence  in  the  House  whenever  six  Republicans  were  absent. 
The  practice  was  a  scandal,  sanctified  by  long  continuance. 

Thomas  B.  Reed  was  elected  Speaker  with  the  support  of 
most  of  his  party  votes,  after  a  caucus  in  which  the  nomina 
tion  had  been  contested  by  Joseph  G.  Cannon,  William  Mc- 
Kinley,  and  David  B.  Henderson.  Reed  raised  McKinley 
to  the  chairmanship  of  the  Committee  on  Ways  and  Means, 
and  determined  upon  his  policy  in  case  the  minority  should 
impede  a  new  revision  of  the  tariff  by  a  filibuster  against  a 
quorum.  The  test  occurred  on  January  29,  1890,  when  the 
minority  remained  silent  during  a  roll-call,  and  the  Speaker 
directed  the  clerk  of  the  House  to  record  the  names  of  the 
Democrats  not  voting  and  to  count  them  present.  The 
ruling  was  autocratic  and  revolutionary  and  precipitated 
a  parliamentary  riot  among  its  Democratic  victims,  who 
leaped  angrily  to  their  feet  to  insist  that  they  were  not 
present.  With  inflexible  good  humor  Reed  observed  that 
they  appeared  to  be  present  and  continued  to  count  their 
names.  After  some  days'  discussion  the  ruling  of  the  chair 
was  upheld  and  the  House  rules  were  changed,  abolishing 
the  old  abuse.  Reed  received  the  nickname  " Czar, "and 
earned  it  in  so  far  as  he  used  his  power  as  Speaker  and  as 
chairman  of  the  Committee  on  Rules  to  prevent  a  minority 
of  the  House  from  interfering  with  the  performance  of  its 
business  by  the  majority.  The  McKinley  tariff  was  taken 
up  as  the  first  important  party  measure. 

There  was  reasonable  room  for  doubt  as  to  the  nature  of 


PROTECTION  147 

the  mandate  of  1888,  since  Cleveland  received  a  majority  of 
the  votes  cast,  while  Harrison  was  elected  Pres-    The 
ident.     But  there  was  no  doubt  as  to  the  in-    McKinley 
tention  of  the  Republican  Party  to  regard  the 
election  as  a  victory  for  the  new  dominant  issue.     "We  are 
uncompromisingly  in  favor  of  the  American  system  of  pro 
tection,"  said  their  party  platform.     "We  protest  against 
its  destruction  as  proposed  by  the  President  and  his  party. 
They  serve  the  interests  of  Europe;  we  will  support  the 
interests  of  America."  The  new  measure  that  McKinley 
reported  to  the  House  represented  the  first  attempt  to  ap 
ply  the  principle  of  protection  systematically.     Burrows,  of 
Michigan,  expressed  the  party  intent: 

"If  there  is  any  article  on  the  free  list  in  this  bill  the  like 
of  which,  by  fair  and  adequate  protection,  could  be  produced 
in  this  country  in  sufficient  quantities  to  meet  the  home  de 
mand,  it  is  an  oversight  on  the  part  of  the  majority  of  the 
committee,  and,  if  it  can  be  pointed  out,  we  will  move  that  it 
be  transferred  to  the  dutiable  list  and  given  such  protection 
as  will  insure  its  production  in  this  country. 

"  If  there  is  a  single  article  on  the  dutiable  list  where  the 
duty  is  so  low  as  to  expose  the  like  domestic  industry  to  a 
ruinous  foreign  competition  and  thus  endanger  its  per 
manency,  it  has  but  to  be  indicated  to  secure  such  measure 
of  protection  as  will  insure  its  safety. 

"  If  the  proposed  rate  of  duty  on  any  article  on  the  duti 
able  list  is  in  excess  of  what  is  required  to  give  fair  and  ade 
quate  protection  to  the  competing  domestic  industry,  none 
will  be  more  ready  than  the  majority  of  your  committee  to 
reduce  the  rate  to  the  level  of  such  requirement." 

The  McKinley  Bill  passed  through  the  usual  phases  of 
tariff  construction;  passed  by  the  House  in  one  form,  it  was 
rewritten  in  the  Senate  and  became  a  law  in  still  a  third 
guise  after  a  thoroughgoing  revision  in  the  conference  com 
mittee.  It  contained  novel  features  in  its  final  form  with 
reference  to  agriculture,  infant  industries,  and  reciprocity. 
The  agricultural  schedules  were  promised  in  1888  to  hold  in 
line  discontented  farmers  in  the  West.  The  lukewarm- 


148     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

ness  of  the  Mississippi  Valley  toward  protection  was  largely 
inspired  by  its  dependence  upon  staple  crops.  Its  complaint 
that  the  tariff  was  for  the  benefit  of  the  manufacturers  was 
now  met  by  the  adoption  of  rates  to  protect  American  food 
from  foreign  competition.  Since  almost  no  food  was  im 
ported  that  could  be  raised  in  the  United  States  at  all,  these 
schedules  were  chiefly  political  in  their  intention.  Sugar, 
however,  was  placed  upon  the  free  list  because,  by  abolishing 
the  revenue  derived  from  it,  the  surplus  could  be  lowered 
about  fifty  million  dollars  a  year.  The  sugar  duty  was  the 
largest  single  item  in  the  tariff  revenue  and  the  easiest  to 
control.  In  order  to  prevent  free  sugar  from  working  in 
jury  to  the  American  producers,  who  raised  about  one  eighth 
of  the  national  supply,  a  bounty  of  two  cents  a  pound  was 
provided  for  these,  with  the  additional  advantage  of  lower 
ing  the  surplus  still  further. 

The  Republican  theory  that  every  commodity  that  could 
be  produced  in  the  United  States  must  be  protected,  reached 
its  logical  extension  in  the  treatment  not  only  of  infant  in 
dustries,  but  of  the  unborn.  For  over  half  a  century  pro 
tectionists  had  described  the  national  advantage  of  en 
couraging  the  beginnings  of  manufacture  in  order  that  the 
infant  industries  might  ultimately  be  able  to  supply  the 
nation  and  make  it  independent  of  the  outside  world.  The 
party  of  Cleveland  declared  that  "the  tariff  is  a  tax"  and 
that  this  protective  rate  increased  the  cost  to  the  American 
purchaser  for  the  selfish  benefit  of  the  manufacturer.  The 
Republican  Party  officially  denied  this  charge  and  sought  to 
prove  that  the  foreign  manufacturer  paid  the  duty,  taking  it 
out  of  the  profits  he  would  otherwise  have  extorted  from  the 
American  public  without  altering  the  retail  price.  The 
treatment  of  tin  plate  carried  the  protective  theory  to  the 
extreme.  This  industry  was  developing  rapidly  because 
of  the  growing  use  of  tin  containers  for  the  preservation  of 
food,  but  the  British  manufacturer  had  maintained  his 
monopoly  of  the  manufacture  of  tin  plate  despite  the  wide 
distribution  of  both  tin  and  steel  in  the  United  States.  The 
McKinley  Bill  provided  a  duty  upon  tin  plate  to  be  made 


PROTECTION  149 

effective  at  the  discretion  of  the  President  when  enough 
American  mills  should  have  been  established  to  mark  the 
birth  of  a  new  infant  industry. 

The  "  Chinese  wall "  of  protection  drawn  around  American 
industry  by  this  act  brought  disappointment  to  many  inde 
pendent  observers.  "This  McKinley  Bill,"  wrote  Gold  win 
Smith,  who  had  worked  twenty  years  for  the  annexation 
of  Canada,  only  to  see  protection  prevail  on  either  side  of 
the  border,  "is  a  sad  relapse  and  a  great  disgrace  to  democ 
racy  ...  at  the  same  time  it  is  right  to  say  that  Protection 
ism  in  the  United  States  is  kept  up  as  much  by  sheer  dint 
of  bribery  as  by  perversion  of  popular  opinion."  James 
Russell  Lowell  regarded  it  as  "the  first  experiment  a  really 
intelligent  people  have  ever  tried  to  make  one  blade  of  grass 
grow  where  two  grew  before,  by  means  of  legislation."  The 
extremity  of  the  act  aroused  the  fears  of  the  Secretary  of 
State  lest  it  interfere  with  his  cherished  policy  of  closer  re 
lations  with  the  Latin  republics.  His  idea  of  promoting 
American  cooperation  had  led  to  the  invitation  of  a  Pan- 
American  Congress  during  his  first  term  as  Secretary  of 
State  in  1881.  Arthur  cancelled  the  invitation,  but  Harri 
son  authorized  its  renewal  when  Elaine  returned  to  power. 
In  October,  1889,  the  delegates  of  the  southern  republics 
met  in  Washington  to  discuss  their  common  interests.  It 
was  futile  to  talk  about  developing  trade  relations  while  pre 
venting  them  through  the  imposition  of  prohibitive  tariffs*. 
The  South  American  exports  were  in  many  cases  raw  ma 
terials  similar  to  those  of  the  United  States.  At  Elaine's 
insistence  reciprocal  arrangements  were  authorized  to  be 
made  for  the  interchange  of  such  commodities,  and  pro 
vision  was  made  for  levying  special  duties  against  such 
countries  as  did  not  participate  in  reciprocity. 

While  the  McKinley  Bill  was  still  under  debate  a  new 
aspect  of  protection  appeared  in  the  demand  of  silver  mine- 
owners  that  their  output  be  protected  like  the    Sherman 
output  of  Eastern  manufacturers.     In  the  Sen-    Silver  Pur- 
ate   there  were  enough   silver   Republicans  to 
make  a  non-partisan  majority  in  favor  of  the  restoration  of 


150    RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

the  free  coinage  of  silver.  A  bill  for  free  coinage  passed 
the  Senate  in  June  and  Western  Republicans  united  in  the 
threat  that  unless  something  were  done  for  silver,  the  silver 
Republicans  would  kill  the  McKinley  Bill  and  block  the 
party  purpose.  The  Treasury  had  spent  to  date,  under 
the  Bland-Allison  Law  of  1878,  $308,000,000  in  the  pur 
chase  of  silver  bullion,  out  of  which  it  had  been  able  to 
coin  $378,000,000  standard  but  depreciated  silver  dollars. 
Most  of^these  were  still  reposing  in  Treasury  vaults,  where 
they  constituted  a  growing  part  of  the  Treasury  surplus. 
The  demand  of  the  silver  miners  for  more  aid  led  to  the 
drafting  of  a  compromise  law,  which  bore  the  name  of  John 
Sherman  and  provided  that  every  month  the  Secretary  of 
the  Treasury  should  purchase  4,500,000  ounces  of  silver, 
paying  for  the  same  with  a  new  issue  of  legal-tender  Treas 
ury  notes.  The  amount  specified  was  intended  to  repre 
sent  the  total  American  production  of  silver.  With  the  pas 
sage  of  the  Silver  Act,  the  obstruction  to  the  McKinley 
Bill  ceased  and  it  was  signed  October  i,  1890. 

The  appropriations  of  the  Fifty-First  Congress  helped  to 
reduce  the  surplus  that  had  embarrassed  every  administra 
tion  for  a  decade.  For  the  first  time  the  appropriations  ex 
ceeded  a  billion  dollars  for  the  biennium.  Congress  was 
lavish  in  its  expenditures  for  salaries  and  public  buildings. 
Its  additions  to  the  pension  laws  met  the  demands  of  the 
organized  veterans  of  the  Civil  War,  and  still  further  re 
duced  the  surplus.  President  Harrison's  first  choice  as 
Commissioner  of  Pensions,  Corporal  Tanner,  had  long  been 
a  persistent  advocate  of  generous  treatment  of  the  pension- 
V  ers.  As  Commissioner  his  policy  was,  wherever  possible, 
to  grant  new  pensions  or  increase  old  ones,  regardless  of  law. 
He  was  soon  removed  from  office,  but  his  successor,  too,  was 
an  advocate  of  liberality.  The  party  was  pledged  to  re; 
verse  Cleveland's  attitude  of  suspicion  of  pensioners,  and 
Congress  passed  in  June,  1890,  a  Dependents'  Pension  Bill 
for  the  relief  of  veterans  who  were  incapacitated,  whether 
because  of  their  military  service  or  not.  Before  the  Fifty- 
First  Congress  had  completed  its  appropriations,  the  sur- 


PROTECTION  151 

plus  ceased  to  cause  anxiety,  and  in  its  place  there  was  un 
easiness  as  to  the  continued  ability  of  the  Treasury  to  do 
business  without  forcing  the  Qheap_silver  dollars  i^tojjse. 

The  close  connection  between  the  Republican  Party  and 
the  manufacturing  interests  was  a  cause  of  increasing  sus 
picion  that  weakened  the  party  in  the  West.    Anti_ 
The  anti-monopoly  movement  was  bringing  the    monopoly 

,.  ,     movement 

business  interests  into  disrepute,  and  the  word 
"trust"  was  acquiring  a  sinister  meaning  in  popular  usage. 
Andrew  Carnegie  decried  "the  bugaboo  of  trusts"  in  the 
North  American  Review  in  1889,  but  the  apprehension  could 
not  be  dispelled  by  mere  denial.  In  his  opinion  the  so-called 
trusts  were  the  outgrowth  of  over-production  and  the  en 
suing  low  prices,  and  were  a  necessary  attempt  to  regulate 
competition  in  such  a  period.  A  growing  public  opinion,  on 
the  contrary,  believed  that  the  trusts  were  huge  combina 
tions  aiming  at  monopoly,  and  saw  objections  to  them 
along  economic,  social,  and  political  lines. 

The  economic  arguments  against  the  trusts  treated  them 
as  agents  of  extortion,  which  deprived  the  public  of  the  ad 
vantages  of  free  competition.  The  maxim  that  "competi 
tion  is  the  life  of  trade"  provided  a  theory  upon  which  the 
common-law  doctrine  rested.  The  public  was  entitled  to 
free  competition  among  its  servants,  and  the  individual 
participating  in  that  competition  had  a  right  to  immunity 
from  combinations  and  conspiracies  among  his  competitors. 
Interference  by  such  conspiracies  with  free  competition 
was  actionable  under  the  common  law.  They  were  magni 
fied  in  importance  when  the  industries  operated  as  giants 
and  brought  the  force  of  their  conspiracy  against  individual 
competitors. 

The  social  objection  to  the  trusts  was  inspired  in  part  by 
an  unwillingness  to  accept  the  changes  in  the  nature  of 
American  life.  The  independence  of  the  individual  farmer 
was  an  ideal  increasingly  difficult  to  realize  as  manufac 
tures  and  transportation  were  reorganized.  The  great 
railroad  company  or  manufacturing  corporation  provided 
occupation  for  a  multitude  of  salaried  subordinates  who 


150     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

the  free  coinage  of  silver.  A  bill  for  free  coinage  passed 
the  Senate  in  June  and  Western  Republicans  united  in  the 
threat  that  unless  something  were  done  for  silver,  the  silver 
Republicans  would  kill  the  McKinley  Bill  and  block  the 
party  purpose.  The  Treasury  had  spent  to  date,  under* 
the  Bland-Allison  Law  of  1878,  $308,000,000  in  the  pur 
chase  of  silver  bullion,  out  of  which  it  had  been  able  to 
coin  $378,000,000  standard  but  depreciated  silver  dollars. 
Most  oL these  were  still  reposing  in  Treasury  vaults,  where 
they  constituted  a  growing  part  of  the  Treasury  surplus. 
The  demand  of  the  silver  miners  for  more  aid  led  to  the 
drafting  of  a  compromise  law,  which  bore  the  name  of  John 
Sherman  and  provided  that  every  month  the  Secretary  of 
the  Treasury  should  purchase  4,500,000  ounces  of  silver, 
paying  for  the  same  with  a  new  issue  of  legal-tender  Treas 
ury  notes.  The  amount  specified  was  intended  to  repre 
sent  the  total  American  production  of  silver.  With  the  pas 
sage  of  the  Silver  Act,  the  obstruction  to  the  McKinley 
Bill  ceased  and  it  was  signed  October  i,  1890. 

The  appropriations  of  the  Fifty-First  Congress  helped  to 
reduce  the  surplus  that  had  embarrassed  every  administra 
tion  for  a  decade.  For  the  first  time  the  appropriations  ex 
ceeded  a  billion  dollars  for  the  biennium.  Congress  was 
lavish  in  its  expenditures  for  salaries  and  public  buildings. 
Its  additions  to  the  pension  laws  met  the  demands  of  the 
organized  veterans  of  the  Civil  War,  and  still  further  re 
duced  the  surplus.  President  Harrison's  first  choice  as 
Commissioner  of  Pensions,  Corporal  Tanner,  had  long  been 
a  persistent  advocate  of  generous  treatment  of  the  pension- 
\S  ers.  As  Commissioner  his  policy  was,  wherever  possible, 
to  grant  new  pensions  or  increase  old  ones,  regardless  of  law. 
He  was  soon  removed  from  office,  but  his  successor,  too,  was 
an  advocate  of  liberality.  The  party  was  pledged  to  re; 
verse  Cleveland's  attitude  of  suspicion  of  pensioners,  and 
Congress  passed  in  June,  1890,  a  Dependents'  Pension  Bill 
for  the  relief  of  veterans  who  were  incapacitated,  whether 
because  of  their  military  service  or  not.  Before  the  Fifty- 
First  Congress  had  completed  its  appropriations,  the  sur- 


PROTECTION  151 

plus  ceased  to  cause  anxiety,  and  in  its  place  there  was  un 
easiness  as  to  the  continued  ability  of  the  Treasury  to  do 
business  without  forcing  the  qheap  silver  dollars  into  use. 

The  close  connection  between  the  Republican  Party  and 
the  manufacturing  interests  was  a  cause  of  increasing  sus 
picion  that  weakened  the  party  in  the  West.    Anti_ 
The  anti-monopoly  movement  was  bringing  the    monopoly 

..  ,      ,  j     movement 

business  interests  into  disrepute,  and  the  word 
"trust"  was  acquiring  a  sinister  meaning  in  popular  usage. 
Andrew  Carnegie  decried  "the  bugaboo  of  trusts"  in  the 
North  American  Review  in  1889,  but  the  apprehension  could 
not  be  dispelled  by  mere  denial.  In  his  opinion  the  so-called 
trusts  were  the  outgrowth  of  over-production  and  the  en 
suing  low  prices,  and  were  a  necessary  attempt  to  regulate 
competition  in  such  a  period.  A  growing  public  opinion,  on 
the  contrary,  believed  that  the  trusts  were  huge  combina 
tions  aiming  at  monopoly,  and  saw  objections  to  them 
along  economic,  social,  and  political  lines. 

The  economic  arguments  against  the  trusts  treated  them 
as  agents  of  extortion,  which  deprived  the  public  of  the  ad 
vantages  of  free  competition.  The  maxim  that  "competi 
tion  is  the  life  of  trade"  provided  a  theory  upon  which  the 
common-law  doctrine  rested.  The  public  was  entitled  to 
free  competition  among  its  servants,  and  the  individual 
participating  in  that  competition  had  a  right  to  immunity 
from  combinations  and  conspiracies  among  his  competitors. 
Interference  by  such  conspiracies  with  free  competition 
was  actionable  under  the  common  law.  They  were  magni 
fied  in  importance  when  the  industries  operated  as  giants 
and  brought  the  force  of  their  conspiracy  against  individual 
competitors. 

The  social  objection  to  the  trusts  was  inspired  in  part  by 
an  unwillingness  to  accept  the  changes  in  the  nature  of 
American  life.  The  independence  of  the  individual  farmer 
was  an  ideal  increasingly  difficult  to  realize  as  manufac 
tures  and  transportation  were  reorganized.  The  great 
railroad  company  or  manufacturing  corporation  provided 
occupation  for  a  multitude  of  salaried  subordinates  who 


152     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

would  have  been  their  own  masters  under  earlier  American 
conditions.  The  number  of  independent  manufacturers 
and  merchants  was  being  further  decreased  by  their  in 
ability  to  meet  the  new  competition.  Men  who  desired 
to  remain  independent  were  forced  to  give  up  the  fight. 
Butchers  were  forced  to  become  distributors  for  the  Chicago 
packers.  Small  merchants  were  forced  to  become  section 
chiefs  in  the  great  department  stores.  The  whole  trend  of 
organization  was  to  reduce  the  number  of  men  in  positions 
of  entire  independence  and  to  increase  the  number  who  op 
erated  as  cogs  in  some  machine.  There  was  a  growing  fear 
that  this  change  would  work  an  injury  in  American  life,  and 
the  middle  eighties  were  filled  with  complaints  against  the 
trusts.  Here  and  there  a  writer  like  Edward  Bellamy  sup 
ported  the  drift  toward  monopoly,  but  the  more  common 
attitude  was  one  of  regret  and  hostility. 

The  political  consequences  of  the  trusts  were  suspected 
and  feared  more  than  they  were  visibly  perceived.  Begin 
ning  with  the  railroad  lobbies  working  for  their  land  grants, 
the  large  corporations  had  appeared  to  expect  favors  from 
legislative  bodies.  They  had  been  able  to  raise  funds  to 
influence  legislation  and  opinion.  The  belief  that  they 
were  guilty  of  common  bribery  was  supported  by  occasional 
established  instances  and  was  increased  by  the  belief  that 
they  had  both  the  funds  and  the  willingness  to  be  corrupt. 
In  some  States  the  affairs  of  a  single  corporation  were  fairly 
comparable  with  those  of  the  State  itself.  The  Southern 
Pacific  Railroad  Company  in  California  and  the  Pennsyl 
vania  Railroad  in  Pennsylvania  were  common  scapegoats. 
A  fear  pervaded  the  country  that  the  people  were  losing 
control  of  their  own  institutions  and  that  the  trusts  were 
gaining  it.  The  Republican  Party  was  particularly  subject 
to  the  suspicion  of  being  under  these  influences. 

The  Sherman  Anti-Trust  Bill,  an  outgrowth  of  anti 
trust  sentiment,  became  a  law  in  July,  1890.  It  extended 
the  principle  of  the  common  law  to  interstate  traffic  and 
forbade  combinations  and  conspiracies  in  restraint  of  trade 
in  commerce  among  the  States,  It  was  made  possible  for 


PROTECTION  153 

an  injured  competitor  to  sue  a  trust  for  damages,  or  for  a 
defendant,  sued  by  the  trust,  to  prove  that  his    Sherman 
prosecutor  was  a  trust  and  quash  the  proceed-    Anti-Trust 
ings,  or  for  the  Government   itself  to  proceed 
against  the  trust  to  procure  its  dissolution.      The  votes 
that  passed  the  law  were  less  partisan  than  those  that  passed 
the  tariff.     The  corporations  had   friends  in  both  parties 
who  desired  to  ward  off  adverse  action.     A  chance  letter 
from  one  of  their  Democratic  friends  written  to  Chauncey 
M.  Depew  strayed  into  the  papers  in  1889.    The  writer  was 
begging  for  a  railroad  pass  and  justified  his  plea,  "  although 
you  are  a  Republican  and  I  am  a  Democrat,  we  do  not 
differ  much  in  regard  to  our  views  in  connection  with  cor 
porate  property,  and  I  may  be  able  to  serve  these  interests 
should  I  pull  through  again." 

The  Republican  docket  of  1890  was  full  of  important 
laws  with  definitive  measures  respecting  tariff,  trusts, 
silver,  and  pensions,  and  with  a  new  high-water  mark  in 
appropriations.  The  list,  with  the  several  groups  of  dis 
senters  produced  by  each  statute,  would  have  endangered 
the  stability  of  a  party  well-founded  on  a  large  majority. 
For  a  party  whose  President  had  been  chosen  by  a  minority 
of  votes,  it  was  calamitous.  The  debate  over  the  tariff, 
which  Cleveland  had  precipitated  in  1887,  and  which  the 
Republican  organization  had  forced  to  the  front  thereafter, 
believing  it  to  be  a  battle-cry  of  victory,  had  been  slow  in 
producing  results.  The  Cleveland  doctrine  took  increasing 
hold  in  the  agricultural  West,  where  depression  had  suc 
ceeded  the  boom  period  of  the  early  eighties.  As  the  date 
approached  for  the  McKinley  Bill  to  become  effective,  the 
city  retail  stores,  even  including  that  of  John  Wanamaker, 
the  Postmaster-General,  urged  their  buyers  to  "purchase 
now  before  the  price  goes  up."  The  belief  that  the  tariff 
was  a  tax  paid  by  the  consumer  took  hold  of  the  whole 
country  and  in  the  Congressional  election  that  followed 
the  adjournment  of  Congress  in  1890  a  landslide  of  discon 
tented  voters  forced  the  Republican  Party  out  of  power. 
Only  88  Republicans  were  elected  to  the  new  Congress, 


154     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

which  included  236  Democrats  and  8  members  of  a  new 
third  party,  that  called  itself  the  Farmers'  Alliance  and  that 
presented  a  baffling  problem  for  the  deliberations  of  politi 
cians. 

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL  NOTE 

Additional  works  having  special  value  at  this  point  are  William  D. 
Orcutt,  Burrows  of  Michigan  and  the  Republican  Party  (191.7),  and  Samuel 
W.  McCall,  Life  of  T.  B.  Reed  (1914). 


CHAPTER  XVI 

THE  FAR  WEST  IN  POLITICS 

THE  Sherman  Silver  Purchase  Act  of  1890  owed  its  passage 
to  a  "hold-up"  in  Congress,  engineered  by  Republican 
Congressmen  from  the  Western  States.  It  was 

.  r        '  .       .       ,     Admission 

not  the  first  occasion  on  which  the  frontier  had  Ofthe 
demanded  and  obtained  legislation  satisfactory  s™™gUS 
to  itself,  but  at  no  preceding  time  had  there 
been  so  large  a  group  of  new  Western  members  present  in  a 
single  Congress.  Six  new  States  were  received  into  the 
Union  between  November,  1889,  and  July,  1890.  North 
Dakota  and  South  Dakota,  Washington  and  Montana  con 
stituted  a  group  admitted  under  an  omnibus  act  signed  by 
Cleveland  in  February,  1889.  Idaho  and  \Vyoming,  which 
failed  to  secure  authorization  in  the  same  act,  made  consti 
tutions  without  authority  for  doing  so  and  were  admitted 
in  the  summer  of  1890.  The  narrow  Republican  majority 
in  each  house  made  that  party  peculiarly  susceptible  to  the 
admission  of  new  States,  whose  Congressional  delegations 
were  likely  to  be  Republican.  Of  the  twelve  Senators  and 
seven  Representatives  allotted  to  the  six  new  States,  all  but 
one  voted  with  the  dominant  party.  Their  support  on 
party  issues  demanded  and  received  its  reward,  with  the 
result  that  the  silver  issue  was  advanced  in  importance  until 
it  threatened  to  displace  the  tariff. 

The  State  of  Co^mdo,  admitted  as  the  thirty-eighth 
State  in  the  centenniSSfcgfc:,  1876,  was  still  in  1890  the  far 
thest  west  of  the  EaflH  Bates.  The  old  frontier  of  States 
as  it  existed  before  ^^P^gjfcffiar  with  its  western  border 
touching  the  plains  along  the  boundaries  of  Minnesota, 
Iowa,  Missouri,  Arkansas,"". JW^:  Texas,  represented  the 
limits  to  which  agriculture  was  able  to  expand  without 
artificial  aid.  The  three  Territories  of  Kansas,  Nebraska, 
and  Colorado,  projecting  west  from  the  middle  of  this  line, 


156     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

owed  their  admission  to  the  need  for  Republican  votes  in  re 
construction  and  to  the  demands  of  the  miners  in  Colorado. 
Their  initial  population  was  small,  but  the  railroads  that 
crossed  them  from  east  to  west,  Union  Pacific,  Burlington, 
Kansas  Pacific,  and  Santa  Fe,  had  lands  to  sell  and  stimu 
lated  their  settlement  by  organized  promotion.  With  the 
revival  of  business  in  1879,  home-seekers  turned  toward  this 
triangle  of  young  States.  Omaha,  Kansas  City,  and  Den 
ver  developed  new  importance  as  distributing  centers.  In 
connection  with  the  cattle  industry  and  with  the  influence  of 
the  Western  prairie  farmers  they  brought  a  new  political 
pressure  in  Congress. 

The  Far  Western  States  of  1880  had  not  been  changed 
since  the  admission  of  Nevada  as  a  rotten  borough  in  1864. 
There  was  no  excuse  for  Nevada  except  that  Lincoln  neesded 
Republican  votes  to  strengthen  the  Union  majority  in  Con 
gress.  Nevada,  Oregon,  and  California  were  separated  fro/n 
the  other  organized  States  of  the  Union  by  a  huge,  irregular 
tract  of  public  domain  that  extended  across  half  the  width 
of  the  continent  along  the  Canadian  line,  and  that  covered 
the  Mexican  border  between  the  Colorado  and  the  Rio 
Grande.  There  were  eight  Territorial  Governments  within 
this  area,  five  in  the  Northwest —  Dakota,  Montana,  Wyo 
ming,  Idaho,  and  Washington.  Two  in  the  Southwest  - 
New  Mexico  and  Arizona  —  were  scarcely  less  primitive 
than  they  had  been  at  the  date  of  their  conquest  in  1846. 
The  barrier  was  narrowest  between  Colorado  and  Nevada 
where  the  Mormon  hierarchy  of  Utah  covered  a  Territory 
and  retarded  its  admission  into  the  Union. 

In  the  earlier  decades  of  frontier  advance  the  prevailing 
growth  had  occurred  along  a  narrow  strip  on  the  western 
edge  of  the  last  frontier.  In  each  generation  since  the  plant 
ing  of  the  seaboard  colonies  the  new  frontier  was  settled  by 
the  children  of  the  old,  and  as  the  new  frontier  ripened  into 
social  consciousness  its  children  were  got  ready  to  repeat 
the  process.  The  systematic  advance  of  the  frontier  was 
checked  at  the  western  border  of  Missouri  by  lack  of  easy 
transportation,  by  the  diminishing  fertility  of  the  land  upon 


THE  FAR  WEST  IN  POLITICS  157 

the  plains,  and  by  the  popular  belief  in  the  existence  of  the 
"Great  American  Desert."  West  of  Missouri  the  agricul 
tural  frontier  did  not  advance  unaided.  When  the  aid 
came  in  the  form  of  free  homesteads  to  advertise  the  W^est 
and  continental  railroads  to  lessen  its  distances,  the  result 
was  a  scattering  of  effort.  The  frontier  line  disappeared  from 
the  map  after  1880.  In  its  place  the  farther  west  was  dotted 
with  irregular  settlements  whose  location  was  determined  by 
natural  resources  or  communications.  From  all  of  these 
there  early  came  demands  for  the  abolition  of  the  Terri 
torial  status  and  for  admission  into  the  Union. 

The  Southwest  Territories  were  the  least  affected  by  the 
incentives  to  colonization,  and  with  a  population  relatively 
stationary  were  the  weakest  of  the  statehood  projects.  New 
Mexico,  with  nearly  three  times  the  population  of  Arizona, 
had  153,000  inhabitants  in  1890,  and  the  preponderance 
of  Mexicans  among  these  weakened  the  force  of  her  inter 
mittent  demands  for  admission. 

The  live  Northwest  Territories  more  than  trebled  in  the 
decade,  the  population  rising  from  301,000  in  1880  to 
1,136,000  in  1890.  Within  their  limits  8673  miles  of  rail 
road  were  completed  in  this  decade.  From  the  valley  of 
the  Red  River  of  the  North  to  the  banks  of  the  Columbia 
and  the  shores  of  Puget  Sound,  clusters  of  inhabitants  were 
spread  along  the  lines  of  the  Northern  Pacific,  and  the 
Great  Northern  which  James  J.  Hill  was  thrusting  through 
the  same  country.  In  Dakota  and  Washington  there  were 
already  organized  movements  for  statehood  earlier  than 
1880.  By  the  date  of  their  admission  Dakota  had  over 
half  a  million  inhabitants  and  Washington  349,000. 

In  the  struggle  for  the  admission  of  Territories  after  Col 
orado,  Dakota  was  the  usual  text  upon  which  arguments 
were  based.  Largest  in  population  and  nearest  the  East, 
if  she  might  not  come  in,  no  Territory  could  hope  for  en 
trance.  Her  demands  for  statehood  were  shaped  by  the 
geographic  facts  that  produced  a  geographic  sectionalism 
within  her  borders.  There  was  no  good  reason  for  most  of 
the  boundary  lines  given  to  the  Western  Territories.  They 


158     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

were  arbitrary  and  rectangular.  Those  of  Dakota  included 
three  isolated  areas  of  divergent  economic  interests.  Oldest 
of  these  was  the  Yankton  country  in  the  southeast  corner. 
Next  in  prominence  was  the  northeast  corner,  where  Red 
River  wheat  became  the  staple  product  of  a  region  singularly 
fitted  for  its  production.  Until  nearly  1890  each  of  these 
sections  had  less  in  common  with  the  other  than  with  the 
city  of  Chicago  through  which  each  maintained  its  contacts 
with  the  outside  world.  The  mining  region  in  the  Black 
Hills  in  the  southwest  corner  found  an  outlet  through 
Cheyenne  and  the  Union  Pacific  and  constituted  a  third 
center  of  sectionalism  in  the  Territory. 

Long  before  statehood  was  in  sight  the  Territory  was  in 
tent  upon  division  before  admission,  and  was  thinking  gen- 
Division  erously  of  its  future  as  two  States.  Educational 
of  Dakota  ancj  penaj  institutions  were  established  in  pairs, 
making  provision  for  the  northern  and  southern  halves 
of  the  Territory.  The  capital  of  the  Territory  was  shifted 
from  Yankton  to  Bismarck,  where  the  Northern  Pacific 
crossed  the  Missouri  River.  Here  Henry  Villard,  while 
celebrating  the  completion  of  his  road  in  1883,  stopped  long 
enough  to  lay  the  cornerstone  of  the  prairie  capital.  "The 
confidence  of  these  Westerns  is  superb,"  wrote  James  Bryce, 
who  was  a  guest  on  Villard's  special  train.  "Men  seem  to 
live  in  the  future  rather  than  in  the  present:  not  that  they 
fail  to  work  while  it  is  called  to-day,  but  that  they  see  the 
country  not  merely  as  it  is,  but  as  it  will  be  twenty,  fifty,  a 
hundred  years  hence,  when  the  seedlings  shall  have  grown  to 
forest  trees." 

The  Western  demand  for  new  States  was  stronger  than 
the  disposition  of  Congress  to  admit  them.  From  1876 
until  1889  Congress  was  at  no  time  under  the  control  of  a 
single  party  except  for  the  two  years  between  1881  and 
1883.  The  Northwest  Territories  were  all  settled  in  years 
in  which  the  Republican  Party  was  dominant  and  in  which 
its  plea  for  party  regularity  received  strong  response  from 
men  who  had  lived  through  the  period  of  the  Civil  War. 
The  probability  that  they  would  add  Republican  votes  to 


THE  FAR  WEST  IN  POLITICS  159 

Congress  created  a  Democratic  reluctance  to  admit  them. 
Dakota  at  least  might  have  been  admitted  in  1883,  when 
the  Republican  Party  was  in  full  control  of  Congress,  had 
not  Senator  Hale,  of  Maine,  obstructed  its  admission  on  the 
ground  that  one  of  its  counties  had  repudiated  an  issue  of 
railroad  bonds.  In  its  zeal  for  rail  connection  with  Chicago, 
Yankton  County  borrowed  money  to  further  the  construc 
tion  of  the  Southern  Dakota  Railroad.  When  the  local 
population  became  dissatisfied  with  the  attitude  of  the  rail 
way  toward  the  county,  it  convinced  itself  that  the  owners 
of  the  bonds  were  culpable  and  defaulted  on  its  interest 
payments.  When  the  bondholders  sought  for  judgments 
against  the  county  officers,  these  resigned.  A  complacent 
legislature  changed  the  law  so  as  to  permit  of  easy  resig 
nations,  and  for  some  years  county  officers  after  their  ap 
pointment  met  by  stealth  to  levy  taxes  and  then  resigned 
to  dodge  the  process-server.  Hale's  objection  was  sufficient 
to  exclude  Dakota  in  1883,  while  Democratic  opposition 
from  the  House  continued  the  exclusion  for  six  more  years. 

The  demand  for  statehood  from  Dakota  and  the  other 
Territories  was  never  long  absent  from  Washington.  The 
Territorial  delegates  in  Congress  made  repeated  speeches 
upon  their  territory,  population,  and  virtues.  An  unau 
thorized  constitution  was  framed  in  Dakota  in  1883,  and 
a  second  with  the  approval  of  the  Territorial  Legislature  in 
1885.  Wheat  farming  was  booming  in  the  eastern  counties, 
the  cattle  industry  was  at  its  height  in  the  bad  lands  on  the 
western  border.  To  the  north,  in  Canada,  the  Canadian 
Pacific  was  completed  in  1885,  and  the  economic  future  of 
the  northern  plains  was  secure  before  Congress  could  be 
prevailed  upon  to  authorize  statehood  action. 

The  defeat  of  Cleveland  in  1888  served  notice  that  after 
one  more  short  session  of  Congress  the  Republican  Party 
would  come  into  complete  control  of  the  National  Govern 
ment.  After  March  4,  1889,  it  would  be  within  the  power 
of  the  Republican  majority  to  admit  any  or  all  of  the  Terri 
tories,  and  they  were  likely  to  increase  their  strength  wher 
ever  new  States  could  do  it.  With  this  prospect  in  view  a 


160    RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

movement  originated  in  the  Democratic  House  of  Repre 
sentatives  in  the  session  after  the  election  to  pass  an  omni 
bus  bill  in  which  the  Democratic  Territory  of  New  Mexico 
should  be  joined  to  the  inevitable  Re'publican  Territories. 
Dakota  and  Washington  presented  the  best  cases  for  ad 
mission;  Montana  had  framed  a  spontaneous  constitution 
in  1884,  and  was  much  in  the  public  mind  because  of  the 
notoriety  of  the  Cceur  d'Alene  mining  boom.  New  Mexico 
made  the  fourth  member  included  in  the  omnibus  bill, 
which  was  passed  by  the  House  in  January,  1889.  The 
Democratic  attempt  to  include  New  Mexico  was  blocked 
by  the  same  tactics  that  Democrats  had  used  against  the 
Northern  Territories.  With  complete  freedom  of  action  in 
sight  there  was  no  need  for  Republicans  to  concede  any 
thing  to  Democrats.  New  Mexico  was  stricken  out,  Dakota 
was  divided,  and  Cleveland  finally  approved  a  Republican 
bill  for  the  admission  of  North  and  South  Dakota,  Mon 
tana  and  Washington. 

In  the  summer  of  1889  these  omnibus  States  completed 
their  constitutions,  drawing  upon  their  inherited  experience 
and  the  spirit  of  the  times  for  their  details.  The  traditional 
form  of  the  American  State  was  repeated  in  every  instance. 
The  prevailing  temper  showed  itself  in  a  multitude  of  re 
strictions  upon  the  officers  of  government,  in  numerous 
articles  upon  railroads  and  corporations  that  reflected  the 
universal  hostility  against  monopoly,  and  in  detailed  speci 
fications  that  made  each  constitution  a  virtual  code  of  laws. 
The  complex  constitutions  were  described  by  Francis  New 
ton  Thorpe  as  striking  documents  in  a  momentous  "case  of 
the  American  People  versus  Themselves."  The  four  States 
were  admitted  by  proclamation  in  November,  1889,  and 
Idaho  and  Wyoming  were  allowed  to  join  them  in  the  fol 
lowing  summer.  "Living  men,"  Owen  WTister  has  written 
of  the  process  that  was  then  under  way-  "Living  men, 
not  very  old  yet,  have  seen  the  Indian  on  the  war-path,  the 
buffalo  stopping  the  train,  the  cowboy  driving  his  cattle, 
the  herder  watching  his  sheep,  the  government  irrigation 
dam,  and  the  automobile  —  have  seen  every  one  of  these 


THE  FAR  WEST  IN  POLITICS  161 

slides  which  progress  puts  for  a  moment  into  its  magic- 
lantern  and  removes  to  replace  with  a  new  one." 

With  the  admission  of  the  omnibus  States  the  number  of 
Territories  was  reduced  to  three,  New  Mexico,   Arizona, 
and  Utah,  in  addition  to  the  tract  of  land  under    Indian 
an  irregular  status  known  as  Indian  Territory.    Terntory 
The  same  influences  that  quickened  the  life  on  the  W7estern 
plains  brought  pressure  upon  the  United  States  to  dissolve 
the  Indian  tribes  and  to  throw  their  territory  open  to  pub 
lic  entry.     The  Territory  of  Oklahoma  was  created  by  an  act 
of  May,  1890,  including  an  irregular  tract  in  the  western  end 
of  Indian  Territory. 

The  old  Indian  country  was  brought  into  existence  by  law 
upon  the  recommendation  of  President  James  Monroe,  who 
urged  that  the  American  desert  be  set  aside  forever  as  the 
home  of  the  Indian.  The  treaties  made  between  1825  and 
1841  transferred  most  of  the  eastern  Indians  to  reservations 
west  of  the  Missouri,  where  Indians  were  protected  against 
the  damage  done  by  contact  with  the  whites  by  the  Inter 
course  Act  of  1834.  The  new  policy  failed  to  settle  the  In 
dian  problem  and  became  only  one  of  its  transitory  stages. 
The  overland  trails  pierced  the  Indian  country  in  all  di 
rections,  and  when  these  were  followed  by  the  continental 
railroads,  the  policy  was  definitely  abandoned.  New  re 
serves  were  brought  into  existence  in  southern  Dakota,  and 
in  the  area  between  Kansas  and  Texas,  which  was  the  sole 
remaining  part  of  the  original  Indian  country.  The  tribes 
living  here,  the  so-called  five  civilized  tribes,  Cherokee, 
Creek,  Choctaw,  Chickasaw,  and  Seminole,  were  punished 
for  their  adherence  to  the  Confederacy  by  the  forfeiture  of 
their  western  lands  in  the  valleys  of  the  Canadian  and  Red 
Rivers. 

The  tribes  that  originally  lived  on  the  buffalo  range  were 
given  reserves  in  these  forfeited  lands,  but  the  difficulty  of 
maintaining  their  rights  of  ownership  increased  as  the  area 
of  free  land  lessened.  Here  were  some  of  the  most  attractive 
lands  on  the  continent,  and  the  acreage  was  far  in  excess  of 
any  use  to  which  the  Indians  could  put  them.  Cattle-men 


162    RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

were  allowed  to  lease  the  grazing  rights  from  the  tribes  that 
owned  them,  and  advanced  the  contention  that  because  of 
their  lease  they  had  the  right  to  exclude  other  cattle-men 
from  driving  their  stock  from  Texas  across  the  Indian 
country  toward  Kansas  and  the  north.  Individual  squatters 
evaded  the  federal  troops  and  established  themselves  upon 
choice  spots  in  the  desired  country.  Its  Indian  name, 
Oklahoma,  "the  beautiful  land,"  began  soon  to  be  heard, 
and  squatters  set  up  the  contention  that  certain  areas  of  the 
forfeited  lands  that  had  not  been  assigned  to  other  tribes 
were  open  to  entry  under  the  general  land  laws.  In  April, 
1879,  Hayes  was  obliged  to  remove  by  force  organized  bands 
of  squatters  who  had  congregated  along  the  northern  bound 
ary  of  Indian  Territory,  at  Caldwell  and  Arkansas  City,  and 
had  publicly  attempted  to  preempt  the  lands.  The  in 
adequacy  of  federal  law  in  the  Indian  country  made  it  im 
possible  to  do  more  to  the  trespassers  than  to  escort  them 
out,  feeding  them  meanwhile  army  rations.  Nearly  every 
year  thereafter  the  attempt  was  repeated  and  the  ejection 
followed.  Arthur  and  Cleveland  both  proclaimed  against  it. 
In  1887  preparations  for  the  eventual  opening  of  the 
Territory  were  begun  in  connection  with  the  Dawes  Act  for 
Opening  of  extinguishing  the  tribal  sovereignty  to  the  land. 
Oklahoma  Under  the  act  each  Indian  received  an  individual 
allotment  and  the  surplus  lands  were  purchased  from  the 
tribe  by  the  United  States  and  turned  into  the  public  do 
main.  One  of  the  latest  laws  that  Cleveland  signed  author 
ized  his  successor  to  issue  a  proclamation  opening  these 
Oklahoma  lands  to  settlement.  A  cordon  of  federal  troops 
was  drawn  around  the  boundaries  of  the  country  to  prevent 
"sooners"  from  entering  in  advance  and  preempting  the 
choicest  tracts.  The  official  race  began  on  April  22,  1889, 
and  within  a  few  hours  Guthrie  and  Oklahoma  City  had 
sprung  into  existence  as  tent  colonies,  speculation  had  be 
gun  in  building  lots,  and  long  queues  of  entrymen  awaited 
their  turn  at  the  federal  land  offices.  There  was  no  Terri 
torial  Government  as  yet.  The  Oklahoma  voters  were 
obliged  to  rely  upon  their  native  respect  for  law,  supple- 


THE  FAR  WEST  IN  POLITICS  163 

mented  here  and  there  by  federal  troops.  A  year  later  the 
Territory  was  formally  organized  and  Oklahoma  was  started 
toward  ultimate  admission. 

Utah  had  completed  forty  years  of  Territorial  life  when 
Oklahoma  was  created  and  would  have  been  admitted  at 
a  much  earlier  date  had  it  not  been  for  the  in- 
stitution  of  polygamy  maintained  there  under  the 
sanction  of  the  Mormon  Church.  In  1862  Congress  for 
bade  polygamy  by  law,  but  the  act  remained  a  dead  letter 
in  the  Territory,  where  plural  marriage  was  not  only  sanc 
tioned,  but  encouraged  by  the  Church.  It  was  impossible 
to  procure  either  indictment  or  conviction  by  juries  drawn 
by  Mormon  officials  and  made  up  of  Mormons.  For  twenty 
years  gentiles  in  Utah  complained  of  the  hierarchy  that 
dominated  the  territory.  The  Edmunds  Law  of  1882  ap 
proached  the  problem  from  a  new  angle.  In  addition  to 
providing  penalties  for  polygamists  it  disqualified  them  for 
jury  service,  public  office,  and  the  franchise.  It  threw  the 
administration  of  the  Territory  into  the  hands  of  the  gentiles 
and  created  a  federal  commission  of  five  to  supervise  the 
enforcement  of  the  law. 

In  spite  of  protests  from  the  Mormon  Church,  the  Ed 
munds  Law  was  enforced  with  the  approval  of  American 
public  opinion.  The  leaders  of  the  Church  with  numerous 
plural  families  were  convicted  and  sentenced,  while  each 
year  brought  into  the  Territory  more  non-Mormon  settlers. 
The  prosperity  of  the  irrigated  counties  in  L^tah  gave  an 
impetus  to  irrigation  in  all  the  arid  regions.  In  1890  the 
Church  gave  up  the  fight.  The  revelation  concerning  plural 
marriage,  which  had  been  officially  published  in  1852,  was 
as  officially  withdrawn.  The  public  attitude  of  the  Church 
became  that  of  discouraging  new  plural  marriages  and  of  ad 
hering  to  the  law.  The  older  heads  of  plural  families  gen 
erally  stuck  to  them  and  took  the  consequences,  but  in  the 
younger  generation  polygamy  became  uncommon.  Presi 
dent  Harrison  accepted  the  change  of  policy,  issued  a  gen 
eral  amnesty  to  former  offenders,  and  Congress  in  1894 
empowered  Utah  to  become  a  State,  The  property  of  the 


1 64     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

Mormon  Church  which  had  been  seized  as  a  punitive 
measure  was  restored  in  1893.  Utah  was  admitted  in  1896. 
The  new  States  of  the  Far  West  reflected  in  their  institu 
tions  the  liberal  ideas  that  were  fighting  in  vain  for  recog- 
Woman  nition  elsewhere  in  the  country.  Most  notable 
suffrage  among  these  was  that  of  woman  suffrage.  Wyo 
ming  accepted  the  principle  in  its  constitution  of  1890  and 
Colorado  adopted  it  by  referendum  in  1893.  The  new 
State  of  Utah  accepted  it  from  the  start,  and  in  November, 
1896,  Idaho  became  the  fourth  of  the  suffrage  States.  The 
movement  had  already  been  the  objective  of  active  re 
formers  for  half  a  century  and  now  entered  into  the  realm 
of  practical  politics.  It  was  fourteen  years  before  the  next 
State,  Washington,  was  added  to  the  list.  After  1910  oppo 
sition  to  woman  suffrage  rapidly  diminished  and  it  became 
a  generally  accepted  fact. 

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL  NOTE 

Robert  P.  Porter,  The  West  from  the  Census  of  1800  (1882),  and  Julian 
Ralph,  Our  Great  West  (1893),  are  useful  general  surveys.  F.  L.  Paxson, 
"The  Admission  of  the  Omnibus  States,  1889-1890,"  in  Wisconsin  State 
Historical  Society,  Proceedings,  1911,  contains  many  bibliographical  refer 
ences.  L.  A.  Coolidge,  Orville  H.  Plait  (1910),  is  the  life  of  a  Senator  long 
interested  in  the  Territories.  Local  histories,  in  addition  to  the  voluminous 
writings  of  Hubert  Howe  Bancroft,  are  John  Hailey,  History  of  Idaho 
(1910),  Edmund  S.  Meany,  History  of  Washington  (1909),  William  A.  Linn, 
Story  of  the  Mormons  (1902),  and  Joseph  Schafer,  History  of  the  Pacific 
Northwest  (1905). 


CHAPTER  XVII 

POPULISM 

THE  social  changes  of  the  eighties  brought  statehood  to 
seven  Territories  and  internal  reconstruction  to  the  near-by 
States.  In  1880  the  United  States  comprised  three  regions 
of  nearly  equal  size,  the  old  States,  the  Territories,  and  the 
frontier  States  that  bordered  on  the  Territories.  In  these 
frontier  States  there  were  still  free  land  and  abundant 
opportunity.  In  Kansas,  Nebraska,  and  Colorado  the  ac 
tual  changes  of  the  decade  were  most  extensive  and  the 
resulting  shift  in  social  needs  and  political  ideals  was  most 
severe. 

The  railroads  built  more  than  eleven  thousand  miles  of 
track  in  these  three  States  between  1880  and  1890,  and  in 
this  region  the  results  of  artificial  stimulation 


produced  the  greatest  immigration.     More  than    tural  over 
production 

a  million  and  a  quarter  new  inhabitants  ap 
peared  in  them,  most  of  them  living  on  the  farm  and  en 
gaging  with  feverish  haste  in  the  erection  of  homes,  towns, 
railroads,  and  the  material  things  of  life.  \\  heat  and  corn 
were  the  staple  commodities  of  this  region.  The  sugar  beet 
began  to  appear  toward  the  end  of  the  period,  but  in  general 
the  farmers  devoted  most  of  their  efforts  to  their  standard 
crops.  There  was  thrown  upon  the  world  a  greater  mass 
of  food  than  could  be  immediately  absorbed.  By  1886 
the  cattle  industry,  that  flourished  just  before  the  farmers 
came,  had  passed  the  period  of  its  greatest  profit.  The 
falling  price  of  meat  due  to  unregulated  production  was  fol 
lowed  by  falling  prices  of  other  agricultural  products.  The 
readiness  with  which  the  manufacturers  turned  to  Con 
gress  for  relief  and  asked  for  protection  to  improve  their 
market  was  paralleled  among  the  farmers  by  a  similar  de 
mand  to  raise  the  prices  of  their  output. 

The  steady  decline  of  prices  hit  with  greatest  severity 


166     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

the  industries  in  which  arrangements  were  made  over  long 
periods  and  in  which  quick  readjustments  to  a  change  in 
prices  were  most  difficult.  The^  Western  and  Southern 
farmers  equally  were  dependent  for  their  prosperity  upon 
a  market  price  that  could  not  even  be  estimated  when  they 
prepared  their  fields  and  sowed  their  crops.  The  manu 
facturer  could  if  need  be  store  his  output  or  reduce  costs 
by  laying  off  his  hands.  The  farmer  with  a  single  crop  had 
no  such  relief  and  must  in  general  stick  to  his  crop  and  sell 
it  for  what  the  market  offered.  The  few  facilities  for 
storing  cotton  in  the  South  were  not  controlled  by  farmers 
or  managed  in  their  interests.  The  Northern  grain  ele 
vators  had  been  objects  of  hostility  to  the  farmers  who  pat 
ronized  them  since  the  Granger  period.  There  appeared 
early  in  the  eighties  movements  in  the  Northwest  and 
South  that  looked,  as  the  Grange  had  done,  to  the  better 
organization  of  the  farmers.  The  manufacturers  had  their 
home  markets  club  and  abundant  means  to  advertise  their 
desires.  The  agrarian  movements  were  carried  on  by  lesser 
men  and  showed  in  their  course  the  poverty  and  political 
inexperience  of  most  of  their  supporters. 

The  origin  of  the  Farmers'  Alliances  that  appeared  in 
most  of  the  Western  States  before  1880  is  to  be  found  in 
Farmers'  the  continuing  consciousness  of  farmers'  prob- 
Alhances  lems.  The  Grange  had  passed  the  crest  of  its  im 
portance  and  the  Alliance  movement  which  succeeded  it  was 
a  spontaneous  growth  out  of  local  conditions  rather  than 
an  expansion  of  a  national  organization.  In  October,  1880, 
the  National  Farmers'  Alliance  held  a  mass  convention  in 
Chicago  and  completed  a  loose  federal  organization.  No 
credentials  appear  to  have  been  required  at  this  convention 
and  its  permanent  chairman  permitted  any  one  to  partici 
pate  who  desired.  The  motive  inspiring  its  three  hundred 
delegates  closely  resembled  that  which  inspired  the  Green 
back  Party  in  the  same  year.  It  was  an  anti-monopoly, 
anti-railroad  body  that  hoped  to  accomplish  results  through 
economic  cooperation  rather  than  politics.  When  the  or 
ganization  held  its  next  annual  convention  in  1881,  the 


POPULISM  167 

delegates  reported  the  existence  of  about  one  thousand 
local  alliances  with  Kansas  and  Nebraska  in  the  lead. 

The  social  side  of  the  alliances  was  similar  to  that  of  the 
Grange.  In  a  few  instances,  where  local  leadership  was 
strong,  farmers'  cooperative  movements  were  developed 
and  maintained  general  stores  or  grain  elevators  for  the 
benefit  of  their  members.  The  movement  was  so  informal 
and  the  leadership  so  little  known  that  the  records  of  its 
growth  are  difficult  to  trace.  Many  of  its  members  were 
identified  also  with  the  Greenback  Party,  and  in  their  cor 
respondence  the  common  aims  of  the  two  movements  are 
sometimes  discussed.  "The  Farmers  are  waking  up  as  they 
have  not  done  since  the  Grange  Movement,"  wrote  one 
of  them  in  1882; —  "our  County  alliance  is  getting  into 
working  order,  and  I  see  calls  in  all  directions  for  a  revival 
of  the  Alliance  Movement."  "We  are  untrammeled  advo 
cates  of  Reform,  with  Rep.  proclivities,"  wrote  another 
to  Lemuel  H.  Weller,  who  was  running  for  Congress  in 
Iowa  on  the  Greenback  ticket.  Jesse  Harper,  an  original 
member  of  the  Republican  Party,  was  speaking  continuously 
for  the  Alliance  in  the  South  and  West.  *'  I  am  speaking  for 
the  poor  man's  party,"  he  wrote  to  Weller,  "hence  do  not 
charge  much.  Ten  dollars  a  day  and  all  expenses."  From 
Nebraska  another  leader  wrote  to  Weller:  "We  have  some 
150  farmer  Alliances  formed  in  the  State.  A  fair  propor 
tion  in  your  district.  Monopoly  candidates  must  stand 
from  under  as  far  as  the  Alliances  are  concerned.  If  you 
are  a  distinctively  farmers'  candidate  and  your  opponent 
a  R.R.  attorney  or  a  Monop.  candidate,  I  could  perhaps  be 
of  some  service  to  you." 

The  National  Alliance  reported  the  existence  of  2700 
local  alliances  in  1883,  and  its  leaders  took  an  active  part 
in  the  reform  activities  started  by  the  Union  Labor  Party 
in  anticipation  of  the  election  of  1888.  "Every  day  brings 
tidings  of  the  uprising  of  the  people,"  wrote  one  of  Weller's 
correspondents  in  1886.  Another  observed  that  "God  is 
killing  all  the  Old  Party  Leaders  pretty  fast.  My  Prayer 
is  he  will  take  Cleveland,  Manning,  Elaine  £  John  Sherman. 


1 68     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

Then  we  may  have  some  hope  finantially  [sic]  in  America." 
The  activities  of  the  leaders  of  the  Alliance  and  of  the 
Knights  of  Labor  became  closely^  interlocked.  The  Na 
tional  Farmers'  Alliance  developed  its  greatest  strength 
among  the  Southern  States,  while  Northern  farmers  tended 
to  join  the  Farmers'  Alliance  and  Industrial  Union.  The 
warfare  between  these  two  bodies  was  largely  a  partisan 
struggle  of  leaders  for  individual  advantage,  but  the  Alli 
ance  was  kept  alive  among  the  farmers.  Thirty-five  thou 
sand  members  were  claimed  by  the  alliances  in  the  sum 
mer  of  1888  and  fifty  thousand  in  1889. 

The  hopes  with  which  farmers  settled  along  the  lines  of 
the  land-grant  railroads  in  the  early  eighties  turned  to  dis- 
Drou  ht  may  before  the  decade  ended.  The  agricultural 
settlements  had  been  worked  too  far  west  in 
Kansas  and  Nebraska,  and  there,  as  well  as  in  eastern  Col 
orado  and  parts  of  Dakota,  were  encroaching  on  the  semi- 
arid  plains.  In  ordinary  years  the  rainfall  west  of  central 
Kansas  is  too  scanty  to  sustain  farming.  From  year  to 
year,  however,  the  average  fluctuates.  In  the  early  eighties 
there  was  a  series  of  years  of  excessive  rainfall  that  produced 
good  crops  nearly  all  the  way  to  Denver.  The  new  regions 
filled  up  with  newcomers  who  had  no  earlier  knowledge  of 
the  country,  and  there  were  few  old  inhabitants  to  shake 
their  heads  at  the  possibility  of  farming  on  the  high  plains. 
The  law  of  averages  reasserted  itself  about  1887  with  the 
result  that  the  crops  received  even  less  than  normal  rainfall 
and  dried  up  early  in  the  summers.  Local  economists,  who 
had  fancied  that  the  "new  science  of  meteorology  had 
changed  the  climate  and  increased  the  rainfall,"  learned 
their  mistake.  In  all  the  organizations  that  appealed  to  dis 
contented  farmers  membership  and  activity  increased  as 
the  decade  neared  its  end.  The  attempt  to  put  together  a 
Union  Labor  Party  with  a  solid  backing  of  workers,  whether 
industrial  or  rural,  was  a  failure  in  1888,  but  the  materials 
for  making  such  a  party  became  more  numerous.  The 
Knights  of  Labor,  declining  from  the  importance  formerly 
held  as  the  official  spokesman  of  the  labor  movement,  en- 


POPULISM  169 

couraged  the  overtures  for  a  union  with  the  farmers  and 
Grand  Master  Workman  Powderly  was  a  constant  figure  at 
the  farmers'  gatherings. 

Both  parties  made  efforts  to  secure  the  support  of  the  dis 
contented.  The  Republican  guarantee  of  protection  for 
farm  products  in  1888  increased  the  difficulty  with  which 
the  farmers  maintained  their  identity  as  a  separate  move 
ment,  and  "traitors  in  disguise"  made  continual  efforts 
to  dump  the  Union  Labor  Party  into  one  or  the  other  of  the 
larger  organizations. 

In  the  autumn  of  1889  the  movement  of  protest  gained 
more  momentum  and  started  in  upon  a  train  of  events  that 
led  to  the  creation  of  an  important  new  third  party.  In  the 
period  of  agricultural  depression  the  farmers  of  this  new 
frontier  learned  a  lesson  that  hard  times  have  brought  out 
in  every  frontier  region,  that  the  payment  of  debt  is  less 
exciting  and  more  painful  than  the  incurring  of  it.  Every 
American  frontier  community  has  been  short  of  capital  and 
in  need  of  credit  which  must  be  obtained  from  wealthier 
regions.  The  country  west  of  Missouri  and  north  of  Texas 
was  settled  by  farmers  most  of  whom  were  in  debt  for  the 
cost  of  migration  and  the  purchase  of  land,  machinery,  and 
stock.  The  per  capita  debt  was  heavier  than  on  earlier 
frontiers  because  the  old  simplicity  of  life  was  gone.  The 
frontier  family  was  less  content  in  a  cabin  than  its  parents 
had  been,  and  insisted  upon  a  house.  There  were  railroads 
to  be  built,  schools  to  be  constructed,  water  systems  to  be 
installed,  and  machinery  to  be  bought.  The  credit  agen 
cies  were  maintained  partly  by  the  banks,  but  largely  by 
mortgage  companies  that  lent  Eastern  money  on  Western 
farm  security,  charging  interest  at  the  rate  of  ten  to  fourteen 
per  cent  in  addition  to  a  premium  for  making  the  loan  at  all. 
The  average  farmer  was  in  debt  beyond  his  reasonable  ex 
pectation  of  ability  to  pay.  Hard  times  destroyed  the  last 
vestige  of  the  expectation.  Facing  bankruptcy  and  de 
pressed  by  falling  prices,  the  Western  farmer  was  suscepti 
ble  to  the  economic  theories  of  those  who  believed  that  con 
ditions  could  be  bettered  by  making  money  more  plentiful 
and  lowering  the  value  of  the  dollar. 


170    RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

r  Free  silver  was  still  the  hope  of  the  miners  who  produced 
that  metal.  In  1890  they  found  themselves  in  a  political 
The  free-  situation  in  which  they  held  the  balance  of 
silver  power  in  Congress  and  procured  the  passage  of 

the  Sherman  Silver  Purchase  Act.  Their  propa 
ganda  for  free  silver  was  maintained  continuously.  Copies 
of  their  pamphlets  were  sent  into  the  newspaper  offices  and 
brought  to  the  attention  of  the  assemblies  of  the  Knights  of 
Labor  and  the  farmers'  societies.  In  November,  1889,  a 
conference  of  free-silver  advocates  was  held  at  St.  Louis  on 
the  call  of  the  mining  stock  exchange  of  that  city.  It  was 
a  miners'  movement  to  raise  the  price  of  silver  by  promoting 
its  use  as  currency.  The  word  "  bimetallism  "  began  to  be 
used  more  widely  by  the  advocates  of  silver  coinage  who 
believed  that  there  was  some  way  whereby  the  Gresham 
law  might  be  kept  from  operating  and  gold  and  silver  dol 
lars  be  kept  circulating  side  by  side,  with  relative  weights  of 
sixteen  to  one.  There  were  some  who  believed  that  Con 
gress  could  by  law  establish  the  relative  values  of  silver  and 
gold ;  others,  less  confident  of  national  power  in  this  direc 
tion,  thought  they  could  be  established  by  international 
agreement.  The  silver  miner  in  general  persuaded  himself 
that  the  result  of  free  silver  or  bimetallism  would  be  to  re 
store  the  price  of  silver  to  the  commercial  ratio  of  sixteen 
to  one.  Their  purpose  of  advocating  free  silver  w~as  to 
raise  the  price  of  their  commodity.  If  this  were  not  ac 
complished  free  silver  for  them  would  be  a  failure. 

In  making  overtures  to  the  Farmers'  Alliance  for  support 
the  silver  producers  invited  aid  from  a  social  group  whose 
motive  in  supporting  free  silver  was  the  direct  opposite  of 
their  own.  The  only  reason  why  the  debtor  farmer  should 
support  free  silver  was  to  raise  prices  by  lowering  the  value 
of  a  dollar.  Free  coinage  might  accomplish  this  in  either 
of  two  ways.  If  the  Gresham  law  operated  and  the  cheap 
silver  dollar  became  a  medium  of  exchange,  prices  would 
rise  in  inverse  ratio  to  the  depreciation  of  the  coin.  If, 
however,  the  Gresham  law  failed  to  operate  and  both  coins 
by  some  miracle  of  legislation  remained  in  circulation,  the 


POPULISM  171 

purchasing  value  of  the  dollar  would  still  be  lowered  by  the 
addition  of  so  many  silver  dollars  to  the  total  money  of 
the  country.  If  prices  rose  for  either  of  these  reasons,  the 
alliances  would  gain  advantage  from  free  silver  only  in 
proportion  as  the  silver  miners  lost  it. 

The  leaders  of  the  Farmers'  Alliance  joined  the  miners  in 
the  St.  Louis  convention,  and  in  officially  adopting  free 
coinage  espoused  a  movement  that  ultimately  submerged 
their  other  demands  for  reform.  They  held  a  second  con 
vention  at  St.  Louis  in  December,  1889,  in  which  it  was 
attempted  to  subordinate  the  local  differences  of  the  North 
ern  and  Southern  alliances  and  to  make  out  of  them  one 
huge  agrarian  organization. 

The  Southern  farmers  wrere  as  susceptible  to  the  ideas  of 
inflation  as  were  the  Western  alliances.  The  annual  cotton 
crop  was  still  financed  by  crop  mortgages  with  Southern 
the  local  storekeeper  as  banker.  The  Western  Alhances 
debt,  or  investment  on  capital  account,  was  matched  in  the 
South  by  debt  created  for  current  maintenance.  For  the 
same  reasons  that  once  induced  the  South  to  support  the 
Greenback  movement,  that  section  now  produced  wide 
support  for  free  silver;  but  its  attitude  toward  organization 
for  accomplishing  results  was  different  from  that  of  the 
Northwest.  Conscious  of  its  race  problem,  Southern  opin 
ion  feared  new  movements  that  might  seriously  divide  the 
vote  of  the  white  population.  The  Southern  alliances  pre 
ferred  to  get  results  by  pressure  in  the  Democratic  primaries. 
The  Western  alliances  had  no  hope  of  working  through  the 
Republican  Party  and  saw  their  advantage  only  through 
the  organization  of  an  independent  party.  The  attempt  at 
a  merger  in  1889  was  unsuccessful,  and  the  matter  went 
over  for  another  year.  The  conditions  meanwhile  through 
out  the  West  were  steadily  becoming  worse.  General  Miles 
in  1890  commented  upon  the  "terrible  results"  of  drought 
in  many  States  and  believed  that  "should  this  impending 
evil  continue  for  a  series  of  years,  no  man  can  anticipate 
what  may  follow." 

The  passage  of  the  McKinley  Bill  in  October,  1890,  was 


1 72     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

the  shot  that  exploded  the  forces  of  Western  discontent. 
The  Republican  majority  in  the  lower  house  was  wiped  out 
and  a  new  majority  was  created  of  Democrats  who  owed 
their  seats  to  the  dissension  caused  by  the  alliances  in  the 
Republican  ranks  and  to  the  discontent  upon  which  the 
alliances  were  based.  When  the  annual  convention  of  the 
alliances  met  at  Ocala,  Florida,  in  December,  1890,  the  re 
sults  of  the  election  were  all  in,  and  the  time  appeared  to 
be  ripe  to  consolidate  the  gains  in  a  new  party  organiza 
tion.  "It  occurs  to  me,"  said  the  chairman  of  one  of  the 
local  meetings,  "that  we  are  the  people,  and  under  the 
name  of  the  'People's  Party'  everybody  can  rally."  From 
a  different  source  one  of  the  Knights  of  Labor  suggested 
"that  they  call  it  the  'Nationalist  Republican  Party,"' 
adding,  "we  are  trying  to  nationalize  the  Republic,  not 
only  its  politics,  but  its  whole  system  of  production,  dis 
tribution  and  exchange.  .  .  . '  We  the  People! '  was  the  cry 
of  the  Sans  Culottes  during  the  horrors  of  the  Robespierre 
revolution,  and  the  taint  of  that  horror  will  stick;  don't 
conjure  it  up  now." 

The  Ocala  conference  failed  to  bring  the  rival  farmers' 
organizations  and  the  Knights  of  Labor  into  a  union,  but 
The  Popu-  a  group  of  its  delegates  after  its  adjournment 
list  Party  signed  the  call  for  a  meeting  to  be  held  at  Cin 
cinnati  in  May,  1891,  to  form  a  third  political  party.  The 
"conglomerate  conference"  was  held  as  called.  The  new 
party,  which  was  to  be  known  as  the  "People's  Party"  or 
the  "Populist,"  in  spite  of  prudential  considerations  among 
its  founders,  already  had  a  Sen&tor-elect,  Peffer,  who  had 
been  chosen  by  the  Kansas  Legislature  to  succeed  the  more 
distinguished  John  J.  Ingalls,  for  whom  reform  had  been 
"an  iridescent  dream." 

The  leaders  at  Cincinnati  were  Ignatius  Donnelly,  of 
Minnesota,  and  General  James  B.  Weaver,  of  Iowa,  who 
had  been  the  Greenback  candidate  for  President  in  1880. 
The  convention  turned  the  farmers'  movement  into  a  politi 
cal  party,  in  spite  of  the  obstruction  of  the  Democratic 
alliances  in  the  South,  and  created  the  usual  national  com- 


POPULISM  173 

mittee  for  the  People's  Party.  The  New  Orleans  Times- 
Democrat  described  it  as  "a  gathering  of  all  the  political 
odds  and  ends,"  and  the  New  York  Nation,  whose  sagacity 
weakened  when  it  dealt  with  Western  themes,  believed  "it 
is  not  likely  that  the  managers  of  either  of  the  great  political 
parties  will  give  much  serious  thought  henceforth  to  the 
'People's  Party'  which  was  organized  in  Cincinnati." 

The  enthusiasm  with  which  the  leaders  of  the  Cincinnati 
convention  were  greeted  at  home  changed  the  notion  that  the 
movement  was  unimportant.  A  national  conference  called 
at  Cincinnati  met  at  St.  Louis  on  February  22,  1892,  to 
consider  plans  for  a  convention  to  nominate  candidates  in 
the  ensuing  campaign.  The  Chicago  Tribune,  aware  of  the 
political  danger,  began  to  attack  them  as  "  calamity  howl 
ers"  and  as  " knaves"  who  sought  to  deceive  simpletons  by 
a  rotten  platform  and  a  debased  currency. 

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL   NOTE 

Frank  L.  McVey,  The  Populist  Movement  (1896),  is  still  the  most  val 
uable  narrative  and  can  be  better  understood  in  the  light  of  F.  J.  Turner, 
"The  Problem  of  the  West,"  in  the  Atlantic  Monthly,  September,  1896, 
and  Carl  Becker,  "  Kansas,"  in  Turner  Essays  (191 1).  Appleton's  Annual 
Cyclopedia  (1892-97)  has  useful  articles  on  populism.  Among  the  biogra 
phies  are  Clement  Dowd,  Life  of  Zebulon  B.  Vance  (1897),  and  William  E. 
Connelley,  Ingalls  of  Kansas  (1909),  and  Life  of  Preston  B.  Plumb  (1913). 


CHAPTER  XVIII 
THE  REELECTION  OF  CLEVELAND,  1892 

THE  national  convention  of  the  People's  Party  met  in 
Omaha  in  July,  1892,  to  nominate  a  candidate  around  whom 
it  might  be  possible  to  rally  the  discontented  forces  of  agri 
culture  and  industry.  The  business  depression  still  con 
tinued  and  added  every  month  new  converts  to  the  farmers' 
cause.  Men  were  less  important  than  principles  in  the  con 
vention,  which  finally  nominated  James  B.  Weaver,  of  Iowa, 
as  its  candidate  after  considering  the  possibility  of  Repub 
lican  dissenters  like  Judge  Walter  Q.  Gresham,  of  Indiana, 
or  silver  advocates  like  Senator  William  M.  Stewart,  of 
Nevada. 

The  Populist  platform,  based  upon  discontent  among  the 
''plain  people,"  recited  a  long  list  of  grievances,  "in  the 
The  Popu-  midst  of  a  nation  brought  to  the  verge  of  moral, 
list  platform  political,  and  material  ruin.  Corruption  domi 
nates  the  ballot-box,  the  legislature,  the  Congress,  and 
touches  even  the  ermine  of  the  bench.  The  people  are 
demoralized;  most  of  the  States  have  been  compelled  to 
isolate  the  voters  at  the  polling-places  to  prevent  univer 
sal  intimidation  or  bribery.  The  newspapers  are  largely 
subsidized  or  muzzled;  public  opinion  silenced;  business 
prostrated;  our  homes  covered  with  mortgages;  labor  im 
poverished;  and  the  land  concentrating  in  the  hands  of 
the  capitalists.  The  urban  workmen  are  denied  the  right 
of  organization  for  self-protection;  imported  pauperized 
labor  beats  down  their  wages;  a  hireling  standing  ajmy, 
unrecognized  by  our  laws,  is  established  to  shoot  them 
down,  and  they  are  rapidly  degenerating  into  European 
conditions.  The  fruits  of.  the  toil  of  millions  are  boldly 
stolen  to  build  up  colossal  fortunes  for  a  few,  unprecedented 
in  the  history  of  mankind;  and  the  possessors  of  these,  in 
turn,  despise  the  republic  and  endanger  liberty.  From 


THE  REELECTION  OF  CLEVELAND,  1892       175 

the  same  prolific  womb  of  governmental  injustice  we  breed 
the  two  great  classes  of  tramps  and  millionaries." 

The  demonetization  of  silver  stood  at  the  head  of  the 
grievances  which  the  Populists  declared  their  intention  to 
correct.  "A  vast  conspiracy  against  mankind  has  been 
organized  .  .  .  and  the  supply  of  currency  is  purposely 
abridged  to  fatten  usurers,  bankrupt  enterprise,  and  en 
slave  industry."  They  demanded  monetary  reforms  in 
cluding  "free  and  unlimited  coinage  of  silver  and  gold  at 
the  present  legal  ratio  of  sixteen  to  one,"  an  increase  in  the 
circulating  medium  to  the  amount  of  fijty^ dollars  per  capita, 
a  national  currency  to  be  lent  by  the  Government  at  two 
per  cent,  and  a  graduated  income  tax,  as  well  as  postal  sav 
ings  banks.  A  second  group  of  demands  declared  for  the 
Government  ownership  of  railroads,  telegraph  and  tele 
phone.  A  third  group  demanded  the  suppression  of  alien 
ownership  of  land,  and  appealed  to  the  single-tax  followers 
of  Henry  George  by  asserting  that  land  "is  the  heritage  of 
the  people,  and  should  not  be  monopolized  for  speculative 
purposes."  In  an  addendum  to  the  platform  the  party  ex 
pressed  its  belief  in  the  Australian  ballot,  reduction  of  tax 
ation,  liberal  pensions,  an  eight-hour  day,  the  initiative  and 
referendum,  a  single  term  for  the  President,  and  the  direct 
election  of  United  States  Senators.  It  condemned  protec 
tion,  national  subsidies  to  private  corporations  in  any  form, 
and  Pinkerton  detectives.  Tom  Watson,  one  of  its  vig 
orous  Southern  supporters,  characterized  the  demands  as 
"Not  a  Revolt,  It  is  a  Revolution." 

While  the  farmers'  movement  was  crystallizing  into  the 
People's  Party  the  Administration  of  Benjamin  Harrison 
was  running  a  lukewarm  course.      Its  crushing    The  Harri. 
defeat  in  the  Congressional  elections  of  1890  dis-    ?on  Admin- 
couraged  the  hopes  of  Republican  success  in  1892. 
The  Democratic   Fifty-Second  Congress  chose  Charles  F. 
Crisp,  of  Georgia,  as  its  Speaker  in  1891  with  a  Republican 
minority  supporting  Reed,  and  with  Thomas  E.  Watson, 
of  Georgia,  securing  votes  of  eight  Farmers'  Alliance  mem 
bers.    A  few  days  before  the  Fifty-Second  Congress  met,  a 


176    RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

threat  of  war  startled  the  United  States.  In  Chile,  where 
Elaine  had  sent  as  Minister  his  Irish  supporter,  Patrick 
Egan,  a  revolution  took  place  in  tfre  summer  of  1891.  The 
open  sympathy  of  Egan  with  Balmaceda,  who  like  himself 
was  anti-English  in  his  views,  and  who  was  overturned  by 
the  revolt,  made  the  American  Minister  persona  non  grata 
with  the  new  Government.  On  October  16  a  group  of 
American  seamen  ashore  at  Valparaiso  were  attacked,  and 
in  the  course  of  the  ensuing  correspondence  a  note  from  the 
new  Foreign  Secretary  was  offensive  to  the  American  Gov 
ernment.  A  sharp  discussion  with  the  new  Government,  of 
which  Montt  was  installed  as  President  in  December,  led  to 
an  unexpected  ultimatum  delivered  by  Harrison  and  trans 
mitted  to  Congress  January  25,  1892.  An  apology  was 
peremptorily  demanded  under  threat  of  war.  On  the  same 
day  a  voluntary  disavowal  was  received  in  the  State  De 
partment  and  was  being  decoded  while  Congress  listened  to 
the  ultimatum.  The  episode  was  unimportant  save  as  to 
its  possible  consequences,  and  was  probably  induced  by 
Egan's  unfitness  for  his  office.  It  served  to  attract  attention 
to  the  ease  with  which  the  President  might  drag  the  nation 
into  war  and  the  inadequacy  of  existing  means  with  which 
to  fight-. 

A  diplomatic  breach  with  Italy  in  which  the  United 
States  was  the  offender  occurred  earlier  in  1891,  following 
an  exasperating  controversy  in  which  Italian  immigrants 
were  arrayed  against  the  New  Orleans  police.  A  group  of 
Italians,  under  suspicion  of  murder  in  New  Orleans,  but 
acquitted  by  the  local  police  authorities,  were  lynched  by 
a  mob  on  March  14.  Popular  feeling  ran  high  because  of 
the  belief  that  the  lynched  Italians  were  the  guiding  spirits 
of  a  secret  society  that  had  sought  to  terrify  the  New 
Orleans  police  by  murder  and  assault.  The  Italian  Min 
ister,  Fava,  denounced  the  local  authorities  as  "recreant 
to  their  duty"  for  their  failure  to  safeguard  the  prisoners, 
and  asserted  the  right  "to  demand  and  obtain  the  punish 
ment  of  the  murderers  and  an  indemnity  for  the  victims." 
This  demand  was  made  in  brusque  fashion  under  threat  of 


THE  REELECTION  OF  CLEVELAND,  1892        177 

severance  of  diplomatic  relations  and  Fava  was  withdrawn 
from  Washington  when  the  United  States  was  unable  to  give 
instant  compliance.  Elaine  wrote  to  Governor  Nicholls, 
of  Louisiana,  that  "the  Government  of  the  United  States 
must  give  to  the  subjects  of  friendly  powers  a  security  which 
it  demands  for  our  own  citizens  when  temporarily  under  a 
foreign  jurisdiction."  The  responsibility  was  easier  to  ad 
mit  than  it  was  to  obtain  redress,  or  punishment  of  the 
guilty.  No  machinery  existed  by  which  the  United  States 
Government  could  compel  the  State  to  punish  the  guilty  or 
to  bear  the  burden  of  its  share  of  the  international  duties  of 
the  National  Government.  Harrison  decried  the  brusque 
manner  of  the  Italian  Government,  but  forgot  the  latter 
when  Chile  became  the  offender.  The  matter  was  ulti 
mately  patched  up  under  the  precedent  afforded  by  the 
Lopez  riot  of  1851.  The  President  maintained  that  foreign 
ers  were  entitled  to  no  better  protection  than  that  afforded 
to  American  citizens,  but  Congress,  upon  his  recommenda 
tion  and  out  of  sympathy  with  the  persons  injured,  indem 
nified  their  heirs. 

The  relations  between  the  President  and  Secretary 
Blaine  attracted  increasing  attention  as  the  convention  of 
1892  drew  near.  In  a  letter  written  in  February  Blaine 
stated  that  he  was  not  a  candidate,  but  his  loyal  friends 
continued  to  hope  that  he  would  yield  and  insisted  upon 
the  need  for  a  more  popular  nominee  than  Harrison.  The 
unusual  success  of  Harrison  on  the  stump  was  in  sharp 
contrast  to  his  unpopularity  in  his  own  office.  In  his  per 
sonal  relationships  with  the  party  leaders  his  manners  were 
irritating.  He  offended  reformers  by  appointing  to  office 
a  long  list  of  Republican  editors,  party  hacks,  and  personal 
associates.  The  leading  party  workers  were  not  concili 
ated,  for  they  got  too  little.  The  wave  of  ballot  reform 
sweeping  over  the  country  was  changing  the  conditions 
under  which  campaigns  should  be  fought.  The  Civil 
Service  Commission  was  allowed  to  grow  in  influence  and 
Harrison  appointed  Theodore  Roosevelt  as  one  of  the  Com 
missioners  and  upheld  him  in  a  vigorous  and  well-advertised 


178     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

fight  to  save  the  civil  service.  Elaine  curtly  resigned  from 
the  Cabinet  three  days  before  the  Republican  Convention 
assembled  and  gave  hope  to  his  ^upporters  that  he  would 
accept  a  nomination. 

The  Republican  Convention  at  Minneapolis  was  under 
the  influence  of  anti-Blaine  men  who  had  no  enthusiasm  for 
The  Re-  tne  alternative.  "  B.  Harrison  would  be  dead  to 
publican  start  with,"  wrote  Speaker  Reed,  who  was  him- 

Convention  ir  .  ...  r^,  , 

self  a  minor  candidate.  There  was  nearly  as 
much  support  for  William  McKinley  as  there  was  for 
Elaine,  but  their  combined  strength  did  not  prevent  the 
renomination  of  Harrison  on  the  first  ballot.  In  spite  of 
its  defeat  in  1890,  the  Republican  Party  reaffirmed  "the 
American  doctrine  of  protection.  .  .  .  We  believe  that  all 
articles  which  cannot  be  produced  in  the  United  States, 
except  luxuries,  should  be  admitted  free  of  duty,  and  that 
on  all  imports  coming  into  competition  with  the  products  of 
American  labor  there  should  be  levied  duties  equal  to  the 
difference  between  wages  abroad  and  at  home."  The  party 
demanded  bimetallism,  but  insisted  that  "every  dollar, 
paper  or  coin,  issued  by  the  Government,  shall  be  as  good 
as  any  other."  Whitelaw  Reid  was  nominated  as  Vice- 
President. 

The  retirement  of  Elaine  from  Harrison's  Cabinet  closed 
his  public  career.  Death  had  broken  up  his  family  within 
Death  of  the  few  months  preceding,  and  his  own  ill-health 
Blame  terminated  his  life  a  few  months  later.  Through 

his  whole  public  career  he  had  been  within  reach  of  the 
largest  success  without  ever  grasping  it.  He  began  in 
a  generation  whose  standards  of  political  practice  were 
those  of  the  business  and  society  to  which  they  belonged. 
He  allowed  himself  to  be  placed  in  positions  which  could 
never  be  explained  when  a  changing  code  of  public  ethics 
became  operative  in  his  later  life.  His  gift  of  leadership 
and  his  vision  of  a  harmonious  western  hemisphere  were 
sufficiently  marked  to  enhance  the  tragedy  of  his  failure  to 
deserve  and  win  the  greatest  rewards  in  public  life. 

Grover  Cleveland  left  the  WThite  House  in  1889  and  took 


THE  REELECTION  OF  CLEVELAND,  1892        179 

up  the  practice  of  law  in  New  York  City  with  his  political  / 
career  apparently  at  an  end.  He  had  succeeded  in  compel 
ling  an  unruly  party  to  accept  his  leadership  and  had  been 
beaten  upon  his  own  issue  at  the  polls.  No  other  President 
so  defeated  had  come  back  into  national  office  except  John 
Quincy  Adams,  whose  long  membership  in  the  House  of 
Representatives  was  more  nearly  a  new  and  independent 
career  than  a  continuation  of  his  earlier  public  life.  In 
Cleveland's  case  the  rule  was  changed.  Within  the  next 
two  years  after  his  defeat  his  following  for  tariff  reform  was 
increased  in  number  arid  was  strengthened  by  the  support 
of  the  forces  of  general  discontent.  After  1890  there  was  i 
widening  recognition  that  he  had  been  the  leader  of  the  ' 
attack  upon  the  tariff.  There  was  no  desire  among  profes 
sional  politicians  to  have  him  back  in  politics,  for,  like  Harri 
son,  he  had  been  stubborn  and  unaccommodating.  Too 
much  a  party  man  to  please  reformers  and  too  little  for  the 
politicians,  his  appeal  to  the  voters  at  large  increased  in 
strength,  and  was  measured  by  the  calls  upon  him  to  dis 
cuss  national  problems  before  popular  audiences.  Before 
the  end  of  1891  his  personal  friends  were  corresponding  on 
a  large  scale  in  the  hope  of  organizing  the  popular  move 
ment  of  approval  so  as  to  compel  his  renomination  by  the 
Democratic  Party  in  1892.  Hill,  of  New  York,  added  to 
the  vogue  of  Cleveland  by  showing  fear  of  it.  At  his  dic 
tation  the  New  York  convention  to  nominate  delegates  to 
the  Democratic  National  Convention  was  summoned  three 
months  ahead  of  time  and  endorsed  Hill  for  the  presidency 
in  the  vain  attempt  to  head  off  the  Cleveland  movement. 
The  New  York  World,  the  leader  of  the  Democratic  dailies, 
advised  against  the  snap  convention.  Hill's  manifest  un 
easiness  strengthened  the  Cleveland  movement,  as  well  as 
the  fact  that  Hill's  opposition  might  be  construed  as  an 
endorsement  of  Cleveland's  merits. 

The  Democratic  Convention  at  Chicago  contained  a  wide 
diversity  of  opinion  upon  the  issues  of  the  day.  The  tend 
ency  of  Populism  and  the  Alliance  movement  was  to  sepa 
rate  Republican  converts  from  that  party,  but  to  create 


I8o    RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

a  populistic  element  within  the  Democrats.  Governor 
Boies,  of  Iowa,  had  a  following  for  the  nomination,  because, 
with  Populist  support,  he  had  beea  elected  in  1889  and  1891 
to  the  leadership  of  a  State  normally  Republican.  Single- 
taxers  and  free-traders  sought  to  influence  the  convention, 
Tom  Johnson,  of  Cleveland,  one  of  their  leaders  and  an  inti 
mate  adviser  of  Henry  George,  devoted  himself  to  defeating 
the  hopes  of  Eastern  Democrats  for  a  straddle  on  the  tariff. 
Later,  as  member  of  Congress,  he  used  his  "leave  to  print" 
in  order  to  read  Henry  George's  volume  on  Protection  or  Free 
Trade  into  the  Congressional  Record,  and  used  his  frank  to 
circulate  more  than  a  million  copies  of  it  before  election. 
At  the  close  of  the  convention  he  was  told  by  William  C. 
Whitney,  Cleveland's  first  Secretary  of  the  Navy,  "  I  would 
rather  have  seen  Cleveland  defeated  than  to  have  had  that 
fool  free-trade  plank  adopted." 

Devotion  to  Cleveland  was  the  unifying  sentiment  of  the 
convention.  He  was  nominated  on  the  first  ballot  with 
Renomi-  ^he  Par^Y  leaders  in  New  York  and  Maryland, 
nation  of  David  B.  Hill  and  Arthur  P.  Gorman,  openly 
disgruntled,  and  with  the  Populist  members  of 
the  party  dissatisfied  by  his  attitude  on  the  currency.  The 
nomination  of  Adlai  E.  Stevenson,  of  Illinois,  a  free-silver 
advocate,  for  the  vice-presidency,  only  partly  appeased  the 
latter  group. 

A  "force"  bill  that  had  been  urged  by  Republicans  in  the 
preceding  Congress  served  to  stiffen  the  Democratic  ranks 
The  can-  among  the  Southern  States  in  the  canvass  of 
vassof  1892.  The  measure  was  inspired  by  Northern 

resentment  at  the  exclusion  of  the  negro  from 
the  franchise.  \Vith  open  defiance  of  the  Fourteenth  and 
Fifteenth  Amendments,  the  South  prevented  the  negro  from 
exercising  his  right  to  vote.  Before  1890  most  negroes  ac 
cepted  the  inevitable  and  gave  up  the  attempt  to  vote,  thus 
reducing  the  opposition  to  the  Southern  Democratic  Party 
to  a  negligible  minority.  In  the  close  elections  from  1876  to 
1888  the  North  bewailed  the  loss  of  the  Republican  votes 
that  the  negro  might  have  cast.  The  Republican  platform 


THE  REELECTION  OF  CLEVELAND,  1892        181 

of  1888  charged  "that  the  present  administration  and  the 
Democratic  majority  in  Congress  owe  their  existence  to  the 
suppression  of  the  ballot  by  a  criminal  nullification  of  the 
Constitution  and  laws  of  the  United  States."  Under  the 
leadership  of  Henry  Cabot  Lodge  and  with  the  support  of 
Northern  Republican  leaders  a  force  bill  to  protect  the  ne 
groes  in  their  right  to  vote  passed  trie  House  in  1890.  It 
was  dropped  in  the  Senate  in  the  following  session  after  the 
party  reverses  of  November.  The  South  kept  its  memory 
alive  by  asserting  that  the  reelection  of  Harrison  would  be 
followed  by  enactment  of  such  a  law.  The  Southern  States . 
began  to  follow  the  example  of  Mississippi  in  accomplish 
ing  virtual  disfranchisement  of  the  negro  by  means  of  an 
education  test. 

The  lifeless  canvass  of  1892  was  due  to  lack  of  general 
enthusiasm  for  Harrison,  uncertainty  as  to  the  operation 
of  the  new  secret  ballot  laws  which  were  in  effect  in  some 
thirty-five  States,  and  the  discouragement  of  inroads  of 
Populism  among  the  Republican  farmers.  In  several  of  the 
Western  States  the  new  party  was  clearly  preparing  to  take 
possession  of  the  whole  local  government.  "Any  man  in 
the  country  standing  upon  the  doctrine  of  high  protection 
would  have  been  defeated,"  said  Senator  Shelby  M.  Cullom. 
"The  people  sat  down  upon  the  McKinley  Tariff  Bill,  and 
they  have  never  gotten  up.  They  were  thoroughly  imbued 
with  the  feeling  that  the  party  did  not  do  right  in  revising 
the  tariff  up  instead  of  down." 

Cleveland  was  reflected  in  November  by  a  slight  plural 
ity  over  Harrison  because  of  the  Populist  secession.  The 
vote  for  Weaver  was  1,040,886.  In  six  States,  all  of  them 
Northern  or  Western,  the  Populist  Party  picked  up  twenty- 
two  electoral  votes.  In  many  others  the  Populist  vote, 
drawn  from  the  Republican  total,  threw  the  victory  to 
Democratic  candidates.  What  was  true  of  the  presidency 
was  true  of  Congress;  because  of  the  schism  the  Democrats 
gained  the  Senate  and  retained  control  of  the  House. 

For  the  first  time  since  the  Civil  War  the  United  States 
National  Government  was  entirely  in  the  hands  of  Demo- 


1 82     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

crats  when  Cleveland  was  reinaugurated  in  1893.  The  new 
Cleveland's  majority  was  in  no  sense  homogeneous,  but  in- 
second  eluded  around  its  Democratic  nucleus  anti-tariff 
Republicans  from  the  East,  anti-monopoly  Re 
publicans  from  the  West,  and  dissatisfied  Republican  re 
formers  like  Wayne  MacVeagh,  Carl  Schurz,  and  Walter 
Q.  Gresham.  "Mr.  Cleveland  had  recognized  in  the  last 
election  a  public  movement  almost  equivalent  to  the  crea 
tion  of  a  new  party,"  said  the  Christian  Union  in  comment 
upon  his  Cabinet  list.  Official  announcement  of  the  person 
nel  of  the  new  Government  was  made  early  in  February. 
Gresham,  who  had  been  a  Republican  until  within  a  few 
months,  was  made  Secretary  of  State.  John  G.  Carlisle, 
the  free-trade  leader  of  the  party  in  the  House,  was  ap 
pointed  to  the  Treasury,  while  Daniel  Lamont,  private 
secretary  in  Cleveland's  first  term,  became  Secretary  of 
War.  Under  Lamont  the  function  of  private  secretary  had 
been  elevated  to  a  new  level.  The  demands  upon  the  time 
and  attention  of  the  President  had  been  accentuated  be 
cause  of  the  long  period  in  which  the  party  had  been  out 
of  power.  Lamont  protected  the  President  with  an  urban 
ity  and  decision  that  brought  him  immediate  recognition. 
The  Navy  Department  was  entrusted  to  Hilary  A.  Herbert, 
of  Alabama,  who  had  been  in  Congress  for  twenty  years 
and  had  recently  acted  as  chairman  of  the  Committee  on 
Naval  Affairs  of  the  House.  Richard  Olney,  of  Massachu 
setts,  became  Attorney-General.  The  pledge  of  Cleveland 
in  his  second  inaugural  was  to  accomplish  the  reformation 
of  the  tariff,  to  prevent  the  further  debasement  of  the  cur 
rency,  and  to  continue  the  reform  of  the  civil  service. 

There  was  wide  comment  upon  the  fact  that  the  new 
Cabinet  differed  from  that  of  Harrison,  in  that  it  included 
no  social  leaders  and  no  men  of  great  wealth.  The  contrast 
was  less  due  to  a  new  principle  in  Cabinet  selection  than  to 
a  shifting  of  social  standards.  Wealth  had  become  more 
ostentatious  in  the  decade  that  was  closing.  City  life  had 
become  more  luxurious,  and  with  the  wide  distribution  of 
prosperity,  luxury  and  personal  service  had  appeared  in 


THE  REELECTION  OF  CLEVELAND,  1892        183 

well-to-do  homes  where  simplicity  had  formerly  prevailed. 
European  travel  was  every  year  introducing  new  ways  of 
life  into  the  United  States.  At  the  World's  Fair,  about  to 
be  opened  in  Chicago  in  commemoration  of  the  discovery  of 
America,  the  display  of  American  inventive  ingenuity  was 
given  a  setting  of  beauty  amid  new  standards  of  art  and 
architecture.  In  New  York  City,  a  few  days  after  the  in 
auguration,  VV.  W.  Astor  opened  his  five-million-dollar 
Hotel  Waldorf,  the  first  institution  of  its  kind  in  the  new 
American  city  life.  The  ostentation  here  was  a  sharp  an 
tithesis  to  the  depression  of  the  Western  States  and  the 
demand  of  farmers  for  immediate  relief. 

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL  NOTE 

G.  F.  Parker,  who  compiled  the  Democratic  campaign  textbook  of 
1892,  has  written  Recollections  of  Grover  Cleveland  (1909),  which  is  supple 
mented  on  the  personal  side  by  Richard  Watson  Gilder,  Grover  Cleveland, 
A  Record  of  Friendship  (1910).  Matilda  Gresham  has  collected  the  papers 
of  her  husband  in  Life  of  Walter  Q.  Gresham  (1920).  Fred  E.  Haynes, 
James  Bird  Weaver  (1919),  reveals  the  continuity  of  membership  among 
the  reform  parties.  Abigail  Dodge,  under  her  familiar  pseudonym  of  Gail 
Hamilton,  set  to  work  on  her  biography  of  Blaine  immediately  after  his 
death. 


CHAPTER  XIX 

THE  PANIC  OF  1893 

THE  silver  dollar  was  worth  sixty-five  cents  in  gold  when 
Cleveland  was  reinaugurated.  In  accordance  with  the 
Bland-Allison  Act,  and  the  Sherman  Act  which  succeeded  it, 
some  417,000,000  silver  dollars  had  been  coineo1  since  1878. 
Of  these,  $362,000,000  were  in  Treasury  vaults,  in  addition 
to  uncoined  silver  worth  $118,000,000,  because  of  the  in 
convenience  with  which  they  were  handled  and  a,  growing 
public  reluctance  to  accept  depreciated  money.  Unlike 
the  greenbacks  there  was  no  promise  to  redeem  the  silver 
dollars  in  gold,  and  only  the  unwillingness  of  each  National 
Administration  since  Hayes  to  force  them  upon  the  public, 
and  the  surplus  revenue  that  made  such  action  unnecessary, 
averted  the  catastrophe  of  a  depreciated  standard.  West 
ern  farmers  who  demanded  free  silver  showed  no  willing 
ness  to  use  the  silver  money  already  on  hand.  Leaders  in 
the  demand  were  frequently  embarrassed  by  the  exposure  of 
the  fact  that  while  calling  loudly  for  free  silver,  they  wrote 
into  their  own  mortgage  contracts  clauses  calling  for  repay 
ment  in  standard  gold  coin. 

When  John  G.  Carlisle  took  over  the  Treasury  Depart 
ment  the  cash  balance  in  the  Treasury  was  a  source  of  ap- 
Stateofthe  prehension.  President  Harrison  and  Secretafy 
Treasury,  Foster,  said  the  Nation  in  its  issue  preceding  the  * 
inauguration,  "are  watching  the  dollars  in  the? 
Treasury  with  unconcealed  anxiety,  and  hoping  against 
hope  that  March  4  will  come  without  an  actual  crash*." 
The  decline  in  imports  due  to  Western  and  Southern  hand 
times  had  reduced  the  revenue  from  the  tariff.  The  silver" 
provisions  of  the  McKinley  Bill  reduced  it  still  further., 
Appropriations  were  consuming  it  more  rapidly  than  ever 
before,  and  it  seemed  likely  that  in  the  fiscal  year  1893 
there  would  be  an  actual  national  deficit. 


THE  PANIC  OF  1893  185 

The  quality  of  the  money  included  in  the  Treasury  bal 
ance  was  as  discouraging  as  its  amount.  Silver  dollars, 
which  the  public  would  not  use  willingly  and  which  were  in 
vicarious  circulation  (through  silver  certificates)  only  be 
cause  the  small  denominations  of  Treasury  notes  had  been 
withdrawn,  became  each  month  a  larger  proportion  of  the 
balance.  The  old  custom  of  making  most  of  the  payments 
to  the  Treasury  in  the  form  of  gold  had  ceased.  Debtors  of 
the  Government  everywhere  took  advantage  of  the  unwill 
ingness  of  Treasury  officials  to  force  silver  into  circulation 
and  began  to  sort  out  from  their  currency  on  hand  gold, 
which  they  hoarded,  while  they  paid  their  silver  and  paper 
to  the  Government.  The  percentage  of  gold  receipts  was 
declining.  The  Sherman  Act  of  1890  was  responsible  for 
an  aggravation  of  the  currency  troubles.  Under  this  law 
the  Treasury  bought  silver  bullion,  paying  for  it  with  legal- 
tender  Treasury  notes.  It  immediately  occasioned  an  in 
flation  of  the  currency  to  the  amount  of  the  monthly  pur 
chase;  as  the  bullion  was  subsequently  coined  into  dollars 
the  legal  tenders  were  withdrawn  in  amounts  to  match  the 
silver  dollars  that  went  into  circulation,  but  before  this  date 
arrived  the  original  holders  of  the  legal  tenders  turned  them 
into  gold  at  the  Treasury  and  carried  off  the  gold. 

Every  month  the  Sherman  Act  not  only  increased  the 
amount  of  cheap  silver  money  as  the  Bland-Allison  Act  had 
done,  but  also  reduced  the  gold  balance  in  the  Treasury 
upon  which  the  stability  of  the  inverted  pyramid  depended. 
The  gold  reserve  which  Secretary  Sherman  had  put  together 
in  anticipation  of  resumption  in  1879  was  carried  on  the 
Treasury  balance  thereafter  as  a  separate  item.  Amounting 
to  about  one  hundred  million  dollars,  it  came  to  be  accepted 
as  a  low-water  mark  below  which  the  gold  could  not  be 
allowed  to  fall  without  endangering  the  standard  of  cur 
rency.  In  the  last  months  of  the  Harrison  Administration 
the  commercial  world  observed  the  decline  of  the  Treasury 
balance  and  the  decreasing  proportion  of  gold  that  it  con 
tained,  and  before  Harrison  left  office  it  was  for  some  weeks 
a  matter  of  chance  alone  whether  he  could  preserve  the 


1  86     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

hundred-million-dollar  gold  reserve  intact.  A  few  weeks 
after  Carlisle  took  over  the  Treasury  the  shrinking  of  the 
gold  reserve  below  this  mark  became  the  visible  index  of 
financial  panic. 

t  T*rre~~chief  elements  in  the  panic  of  1893  were  financial 
(apprehension  and  over-investment.  The  former  of  these 
Causes  of  was  inspired  by  the  fear  that  the  gold  dollar 
the  panic  would  cease  to  be  the  standard  of  value  and  that 
in  its  place  a  depreciated  silver  dollar  or,  even 
worse,  an  issue  of  irredeemable  paper,  might  force  gold  to 
a  premium  as  had  been  done  during  the  Civil  War.  The 
attempt  at  bimetallism  was  still  a  failure.  The  relative 
weight  of  the  gold  and  silver  dollars,  fixed  at  sixteen  to  one 
in  1835,  had  no  effect  upon  the  market  value  of  the  metals. 
The  bullion  value  of  the  silver  dollar  had  declined  steadily 
since  1873.  Both  dollars  were  still  legal  tender,  but  most 
of  the  silver  was  in  the  Treasury  instead  of  in  circulation. 
Every  owner  of  invested  capital  had  financial  reason  to  fear 
the  change  from  gold  to  silver  standard  which  would  reduce 
the  value  of  his  dollars  in  proportion  to  the  depreciation  of 
silver.  Persons  living  on  fixed  salaries  and  all  wage-earners 
were  in  a  similar  condition.  If  such  a  shift  .were  produced 
unavoidably,  it  would  cause  irremediable  catastrophe;  if 
produced  deliberately,  it  would  be  repudiation  and  a  crime. 
Nervousness  as  to  the  safety  of  the  gold  standard  was 
most  pronounced  in  the  Eastern  and  Middle  States,  and 
was  intensified  after  1890  by  two  strong  forces.  The  in^ 
crease  oLsilver  money  and  the  decline  of  th 


were  ominous  external  symptoms  of  weakness.  The  swell 
ing  Western  demand  for  free  silver,  which  stood  at  the  head 
of  the  list  of  social  panaceas,  was  still  more  ominous,  as 
revealing  a  popular  intent  that  might  be  successful.  Fear 
of  free  silver,  as  it  became  more  general,  stimulated  an  in 
creased  hoarding  of  gold  and  by  this  accelerated  the  shift 
toward  the  silver  basis. 

Over-investment  had  by  1890  produced  in  the  United 
States  an  unsound  condition  that  would  have  compelled 
liquidation  of  debts  and  an  ensuing  depression  even  if  there 


THE  PANIC  OF  1893  187 

had  been  no  currency  apprehensions  to  unsettle  the  nerves 
of  business.  Since  1873  the  United  States  had  passed 
through  one  of  the  economic  cycles  that  revolved  at  irregu 
lar  intervals  through  the  nineteenth  century.  The  years 
1819,  1837,  1857,  and  1873  marked  the  completion  of  ear 
lier  revolutions,  and  the  United  States  was  in  1890  rap 
idly  approaching  the  end  of  another  period  and  the  need  to 
balance  its  books  and  begin  again. 

With  falling  prices  and  rising  wages  typical  of  the  period 
after  1873  the  level  of  social  welfare  in  America  was  higher 
than  it  ever  had  been.  But  with  new  inventions  and  greater 
ease  in  fulfilling  old  needs  the  demand  for  comfort  and  lux 
ury  was  steadily  growing.  The  farmer  boy,  bred  to  the 
simplicity  of  the  country,  expected  to  live  better  when  he 
moved  to  town.  The  comforts  of  the  city  became  available 
on  the  farm  through  the  enticing  advertising  pages  of  the 
farm  papers  and  the  catalogues  of  the  mail-order  houses. 
There  were  better  opportunities  to  educate  the  children  in 
the  State  universities  and  the  enlarged  Eastern  colleges. 
There  were  railroads  to  be  built,  farms  to  be  paid  for  and 
stocked,  cities  to  be  extended  into  their  suburbs.  The  in 
creasing  annual  accumulation  of  wealth  was  met  by  more 
rapidly  increasing  demands  for  expenditure  and  investment. 
Nearly  every  year  after  1879  saw  heavier  pressure  upon  the 
resources  available  for  permanent  investment,  and  brought 
nearer  the  date  at  which  new  projects  would  have  to  stop 
through  lack  of  capital,  at  which  going  projects  would  be 
forced  to  get  along  upon  smaller  loans,  and  at  which  bank 
ruptcy  would  confront  not  only  speculative  business,  but 
every  business  that  depended  upon  continued  credit. 

The  cycles  of  prosperity  and  panic  have  always  been  de 
termined  by  the  ratio_ofjDnxluction  of  wealth  to  its  use  and 
investment.  They  have  been  further  modified  by  psycho- 
logicat  conditions.  In  the  years  of  business  depression 
after  1873,  nren  held  themselves  down  to  safe  and  sane 
business,  and  took  few  avoidable  risks.  The  gains  of  busi 
ness  were  small,  but  relatively  sure.  In  the  next  five  years 
the  accumulated  savings  of  a  scared  and  frugal  society  be- 


i88     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

gan  to  press  for  means  of  safe  investment,  and  promoters 
of  new  ventures,  assured  by  their  avoidance  of  failure  in  the 
careful  years,  regained  their  nerve.  About  the  date  of  re 
sumption  money  became  available  for  enterprises  that  were 
well  endorsed.  Men  of  good  repute,  like  Henry  Villard, 
could  obtain  funds  even  for  unmentioned  ends,  and  the 
enlarged  profits  of  business  both  increased  the  available 
capital  and  encouraged  the  spirit  to  risk  again.  The  failure 
of  Grant  and  Ward  in  1884  revealed  the  existence  of  specu 
lators  of  doubtful  honor,  but  did  not  check  the  movement 
for  speculative  investment.  The  rumors  of  great  fortunes 
to  be  made  in  mines  or  in  ^railroads,  in  manufacture  or  in 
cattle-raising,  brought  within  reach  of  business  the  isolated 
savings  of  cautious  individuals  and  kept  filled  up  that  fund 
out  of  which  every  new  venture  must  be  financed.  In  the 
long  run  no  permanent  investment  can  be  made  except  it 
be  paid  for  out  of  the  capital  that  some  one  has  produced 
and  saved.  That  fund  is  not  without  limit,  and  after  a 
dozen  years  of  speculation  society  is  warranted  in  suspect 
ing  that  it  may  have  approached  the  margin.  When  the 
margin  is  reached,  and  there  is  no  longer  capital  available 
for  the  former  scale  of  speculation  or  investment,  something 
must  yield.  And  if  at  this  moment  some  financial  accident 
scares  the  world,  and  men  generally  try  to  save  some  of  their 
property  by  selling  part  of  it  at  a  forced  sale,  no  one  can 
foretell  the  extent  of  the  panic  that  may  ensue. 

The  panic  of  1873  was  precipitated  by  the  failure  of  Jay 

Cooke.     That  of  1857  came  after  the  collapse  of  the  Ohio 

Life  and  Trust  Company.      In  1893,  after  three  years  of 

warning  and  agricultural  depression,  with  fear  as  to  the 

value  of  all  property  aroused  by  the  danger  of  the  silver 

r\  basis,  the  panic  was  precipitated  by  the  failure  of  the  gold 

(  reserve  to  keep  above  the  level  of  $100,000,000. 

The  Democratic  Party,  organized  around  the  issue  of 
tariff  reform,  was  unprepared  to  meet  the  issue  presented 
by  a  financial  panic  caused  by  dread  of  a  silver  currency. 
Like  the  Republican  Party,  it  had  avoided  a  clear  expres 
sion  of  views  upon  the  currency,  and  had  adhered  to  safe 


THE  PANIC  OF  1893  189 

and  unmeaning  phrases  that  all  money  must  be  of  equal 
value  and  that  there  must  be  no  discrimination  against 
one  of  the  traditional  metals.  Both  parties  included  voters 
who  desired  free  silver,  whether  from  the  hope  of  raising 
its  price  or  that  of  decreasing  the  value  of  the  dollar;  and 
both  contained  others  to  whom  free  silver  was  anathema. 

In  1892,  with  the  People's  Party  calling  for  ''free  and  un 
limited  coinage  of  silver  and  gold"  and  a  circulation  of 
fifty  dollars  per  capita,  the  Republicans  asked  for  "the 
use  of  both  gold  and  silver  as  standard  money  ...  so  that 
the  purchasing  and  debt-paying  power  of  the  dollar,  whether 
of  silver,  gold,  or  paper,  shall  be  at  all  times  equal."  The 
Democrats  called  "the  Republican  legislation  known  as  the 
Sherman  Act  of  1890"  a  "cowardly  makeshift,"  and  also 
held  "to  the  coinage  of  both  gold  and  silver  without  dis 
crimination  against  either  metal,"  but  insisted  that  all  of 
either  variety  of  money,  as  well  as  paper,  must  be  kept  at 
par  in  coin.  Neither  party  ventured  to  say  how  any  nation 
could  coin  both  metals  freely  and  yet  avoid  the  fact  that 
two  dollars  of  unequal  value  are  not  the  same.  With  vague 
phrases  which  any  advocate  might  twist  into  at  least  a 
partial  endorsement  of  his  own  demand,  the  two  great 
parties  dodged  the  issue  of  the  currency. 

International  agreement  was  again  invoked  to  try  to 
accomplish  what  could  not  be  done  by  the  United  States 
alone.  The  suggestion  that  the  two  dollars  be  brought 
together  in  value  by  putting  more  silver  into  the  silver 
coin  until  it  was  worth  a  dollar  in  gold  was  rejected.  Such 
policy  would  defeat  the  aim  of  the  mine-owners  who  wanted 
a  higher  price  for  their  bullion ;  and  of  the  farmer  inflation 
ists  who  wanted  cheaper  money.  It  being  clearly  impossi 
ble  for  the  United  States  by  law  to  raise  the  price  of  silver, 
a  monetary  conference  was  convened  at  Brussels  upon  in 
vitation  of  the  United  States  to  consider  fixing  such  price 
by  international  action.  Twenty  nations  were  present  in 
the  conference  that  sat  in  November,  1892;  but  their  long 
discussions  only  brought  out  the  fact  that  most  of  the  im 
portant  nations  had  adopted  the  gold  standard,  and  were 


RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

satisfied  with  it.  Like  the  preceding  meetings  of  1878  and 
1 88 1,  this  conference  took  no  action  to  help  the  United 
States  out  of  its  currency  dilemma. 

Neither  party  was  pledged  to  a  dear  policy  respecting 
silver  in  1892,  but  there  was  no  doubt  where  Cleveland 
stood.  Before  he  was  first  inaugurated  in  1885  he  went  out 
of  his  way  to  show  his  belief  in  the  gold  standard  and  the 
necessity  to  hold  the  country  upon  a  gold  basis.  By  ad 
ministrative  acts  he  prevented  the  Bland-Allison  dollars 
from  driving  gold  to  a  premium.  The  same  policy  was  fol 
lowed  by  his  successor,  who  urged  in  vain  the  repeal  of  the 
Sherman  Act.  With  panic  confronting  the  new  Adminis 
tration  in  1893,  and  with  Cleveland  clear  upon  the  action 
needed,  the  Democratic  majority  that  had  been  organized  to 
revise  a  tariff  was  called  upon  to  reestablish  the  currency 
upon  a  safe  basis.  It  had  no  mandate  upon  this,  and  no 
agreement  among  its  members.  It  faced  wreck  upon  a  new 
problem  before  it  had  time  even  to  consider  the  work  for 
which  it  had  been  preparing  since  1887. 

The  gold  reserve  fell  below  $100,000,000  on  April  21, 
1893.  The  alternatives  before  the  Treasury  were  to  borrow 
gold  and  thus  maintain  the  reserve,  or  to  pay  the  obliga 
tions  of  the  United  States  in  any  lawful  money,  gold,  silver, 
or  paper,  and  permit  the  cheapest  form  of  the  currency  to 
shift  the  value  of  the  dollar  to  its  own  basis.  Gresham's 
law,  that  bad  money  drives  out  good,  had  operated  too 
often  for  there  to  be  any  doubt  as  to  the  consequence  of 
paying  public  debts  in  silver.  On  the  other  hand,  if  gold 
were  borrowed,  the  necessary  publicity  of  this  remedy  would 
increase  the  nervousness  and  accelerate  the  run  upon  the 
Treasury  for  the  redemption  of  paper  in  gold.  And  every 
month  by  law  the  Treasury  was  forced  to  buy  four  and  a 
half  million  ounces  of  silver,  and  pay  for  it  in  another  issue 
of  legal-tender  notes.  Not  until  August  did  the  gold  re 
serve  get  back  to  its  normal  amount,  and  in  the  meantime 
financial  advice  and  political  maneuver  were-focused  upon 
the  Sherman  Act. 

Commercial  failures  were  numerous  during  the  spring 


THE  PANIC  OF  1893  191 

of  1893,  beginning  with  that  of  the  Reading  Railroad  in 
January.  As  nervousness  increased,  banks  con-  Panic  and 
tracted  their  loans,  and  speculators  unloaded  depression 
their  holdings  to  save  themselves  or  were  sold  out  to  cover 
their  margins.  In  May  there  was  a  stampede  for  safety, 
with  failures  of  brokers,  banks,  railroads,  and  industrials 
on  every  hand.  The  New  York  Clearing-House  resorted 
to  the  use  of  certificates  instead  of  currency  to  settle  bal 
ances,  while  the  report  in  June  that  the  mints  of  India  had 
ceased  the  coinage  of  silver  tended  to  lower  the  price  of 
that  metal  still  further  and  make  panic  worse.  On  June  30 
Cleveland  summoned  Congress  to  meet  in  special  session 
on  August  7,  1893,  to  repeal  the  Silver  Purchase  Act. 

Not  until  nearly  thirty  years  later  did  it  become  common 
knowledge  that  at  the  crisis  of  the  panic  the  life  of  Cleve 
land  was  in  danger.  Many  years  later  the  surgeon,  Dr. 
W.  W.  Keen,  who  was  called  in  to  operate,  told  of  the  grave 
condition  affecting  the  roof  of  Cleveland's  mouth,  and  the 
hesitation  with  which  an  operation  which  might  affect  his 
life  was  undertaken.  Secrecy  was  observed  at  the  time  be 
cause  of  the  belief  that  knowledge  of  the  President's  condi 
tion,  with  a  Vice-President,  Adlai  Stevenson,  who  believed 
in  free  silver,  in  the  offing,  would  make  the  panic  worse. 
Between  the  call  for  the  special  session  and  the  date  of  its 
meeting  Cleveland  left  Washington,  ostensibly  for  a  cruise 
on  the  yacht  of  New  York  friends.  The  operation  took  place 
while  the  yacht  lay  at  anchor  in  the  East  River,  and  Cleve 
land  was  then  protected  from  public  observation  at  his 
home  on  Buzzard's  Bay  until  he  had  recovered  from  its 
effects. 

A  storm  of  political  dissatisfaction  broke  upon  the  Presi 
dent  when  his  intention  to  call  a  special  session  was  made 
known.     To  the  silver  Democrats  of  the  West    Repeal  of 
and  South  the  act  seemed  like  apostasy  to  the    the  s^?' 

man  Silver 

interests  ot   the  common   people.      Charles  S.    Purchase 
Thomas,  of  Denver,  in  an  open  letter  to  Secre-    Act 
tary  Carlisle  charged  him  with  abandoning  these  interests 
and  demanded  that  the  Government  take  advantage  of  its 


192    RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

privilege  to  pay  debts  in  any  kind  of  lawful  money  and 
force  the  silver  dollars  into  circulation.  Governor  Davis 
H.  Waite,  of  Colorado,  whom  the  Populists  had  elected  in 
the  preceding  year,  announced  thafit  would  be  the  duty 
of  his  State  to  coin  silver  dollars  at  the  old  ratio  on  its  own 
account  and  make  them  legal  tender,  and  indulged  in  rhet 
oric  that  made  him  nationally  famous  after  a  silver  con 
vention  in  July,  where  he  declared,  "It  is  better,  infinitely 
better,  that  blood  should  flow  to  the  horses'  bridles  rather 
than  our  national  liberties  should  be  destroyed."  On 
August  I  the  silver  forces  met  in  convention  in  Chicago. 
The  representatives  of  the  mine-owners  were  present, 
"  Bloody-Bridles"  Waite  was  there,  with  Ignatius  Donnelly, 
a  spokesman  of  the  Populists,  and  Terence  V.  Powderly,  of 
the  Knights  of  Labor.  The  convention  denied  that  the 
Sherman  Act  was  the  cause  of  the  hard  times  and  ascribed 
them  to  the  "crime  of  1873,"  a  conspiracy  of  the  moneyed 
classes  to  outlaw  silver,  and  by  limiting  new  coinage  to 
gold,  a  single  metal,  to  raise  the  value  of  the  dollar  for  their 
own  advantage. 

Crisp  was  reflected  Speaker  when  Congress  assembled 
on  August  7,  over  Reed,  the  Republican  leader,  and  Simp 
son,  of  Kansas,  who  was  supported  by  seven  Populists' 
votes.  Elected  the  preceding  year  "to  change  our  tariff 
policy  from  a  protective  to  a  revenue  basis,"  Congress  was 
now  obliged  by  the  panic  to  change  the  financial  policy  of 
the  country,  for  which  neither  party  was  prepared.  Reed 
and  most  of  the  minority  members  responded  to  the  demand 
of  the  President  that  the  Sherman  Act  be  repealed,  and  with 
the  gold  Democrats,  made  a  majority  that  passed  the  re 
peal  bill  through  the  House  before  the  end  of  August. 
.  The  acute  panic  of  1893  was  ended  when  the  action  of 
the  House  of  Representatives  indicated  that  the  repeal  was 
to  be  accomplished.  The  resulting  confidence  that  the 
National  Administration  would  not  be  a  party  to  the  depre 
ciation  of  the  currency  strengthened  the  nerve  of  business. 
Depression  continued  for  at  least  four  years,  but  the  vio 
lent  liquidation  was  over.  The  leadership  of  the  President 


THE  PANIC  OF  1893  193 

not  only  held  Congress  to  the  repeal,  but  carried  the  issue 
into  the  party  conventions  of  the  year.  In  Nebraska 
J.  Sterling  Morton,  Secretary  of  Agriculture,  and  a  strong 
gold  Democrat,  sought  endorsement  of  the  policy  of  Cleve 
land  at  the  Democratic  Convention  in  October.  He  was 
opposed  by  a  silver  faction  in  the  convention  under  the 
leadership  of  Congressman  William  Jennings  Bryan,  whom* 
the  Outlook  described  as  the  finest  orator  and  Best  thinker 
among  the  free-trade  and  the  free-silver  Democrats.  When 
Bryan  was  beaten  in  the  convention  and  announced  his 
shift  to  Populism,  it  commented,  "There  is  no  man  in  the 
West  whose  change  of  political  affiliation  is  of  greater  con 
sequence."  The  repeal  of  the  Sherman  Act  was  signed  on' 
November  I,  after  Bland  and  Bryan  had  tried  in  vain  to 
operate  a  filibuster  against  it.  ''Eighteen  months  ago,"* 
said  the  Nation,  "the  coolest  observers  thought  the  chances 
favored  free  coinage,  and  wre  certainly  escaped  from  it  only 
by  the  narrowest  squeak." 

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL  NOTE 

F.  W.  Taussig,  The  Silver  Situation  in  the  United  States  (1892);  J.  L. 
Laughlin,  Bi-Metallism  in  the  United  States  (1896);  Charles  J.  Bullock, 
Monetary  History  of  the  United  States  (1900);  and  M.  S.  Wildman,  Money 
Inflation  in  the  United  States  (1905),  devote  much  space  to  the  topic  of  free 
silver.  W.  H.  Harvey,  Coin's  Financial  School  (1894),  is  a  persuasive 
free-silver  tract  widely  used  for  campaign  purposes  and  answered  by 
Horace  White,  Coins  Financial  Fool:  or,  The  Artful  Dodger  Exposed  (1896). 
W.  Jett  Lauck,  Causes  of  the  Panic  of  1893  (1907),  is  a  clear  and  useful 
analysis.  Reference  should  also  be  made  to  the  files  of  the  Arena,  the 
Forum,  the  North  American  Review,  and  Sound  Currency. 


CHAPTER  XX 

INDUSTRIAL  UNREST 

THE  controversy  over  free  silver  precipitated  another 
episode  in  the  age-long  controversy  between  those  with 
Free  silver  money  an<^  those  without.  In  its  simplest  form 
and  class  free  silver  was  a  device  whose  widest  appeal  was 
to  farmers  burdened  with  the  debts  incurred  in 
the  speculative  decade  just  ended  and  exasperated  by  the 
continuous  downward  trend  of  prices.  Wheat,  corn,  and 
cotton,  each  the  chief  financial  reliance  of  a  great  and  uni 
form  section  of  the  United  States,  were  all  so  low  as  to 
endanger  the  stability  of  their  respective  regions.  Free 
silver  promised  certainly  to  increase  the  amount  of  cur 
rency  and  probably  to  lower  the  value  of  the  dollar.  It 
was  easy  to  convince  the  debtor  section  of  the  country  that 
the  falling  prices  were  due  to  the  conspiracy  to  raise  the 
price  of  gold. 

The  opposition  to  free  silver  was  as  instinctive  among 
the  prosperous  elements  in  society  as  belief  in  free  silver 
was  among  the  debtor  farmers.  The  strong  probability 
that  free  silver  would  bring  the  Gresham  law  into  operation, 
drive  gold  to  a  premium,  and  lower  the  purchasing  value 
of  the  dollar,  inspired  fear  amounting  to  terror  and  panic 
throughout  the  East  and  North.  In  these  regions  free  sil 
ver  appeared  to  be  repudiation  and  deliberate  dishonesty. 
The  social  cleavage  between  debtor  and  creditor  classes  ex 
posed  by  the  free-silver  movement  was  intensified  by  the 
fact  of  a  sectional  division  along  similar  lines.  The  North 
was  predisposed  to  the  gold  standard  in  spite  of  party.  The 
South  and  West,  in  spite  of  party,  were  against  it. 

The  currency  dispute  involved  more  than  the  financial 
interests  of  either  class.  In  a  technical  way,  like  the  green 
back  controversy,  it  involved  an  examination  of  existing 
laws  with  a  view  to  determining  the  rights  of  the  Govern- 


INDUSTRIAL  UNREST  195 

ment  of  the  United  States  under  its  statutes.  The  dis 
cretionary  power  of  the  Government  to  use  "lawful  money  " 
in  meeting  its  obligations,  and  to  determine  by  law  what 
should  constitute  lawful  money,  was  made  clear  by  a  study 
of  the  currency  legislation.  Either  silver  or  greenbacks 
might  be  used  to  meet  most  of  the  obligations,  without 
infringing  any  existing  law. 

Behind  the  question  of  the  legal  right  lay  the  larger 
questions  of  moral  right  and  of  financial  expediency.  Most 
Americans  in  the  heat  of  the  controversy  were  too  warmly 
biased  by  their  selfish  interests  to  be  detached  judges  of  the 
larger  issues.  It  was  only  a  minority  which  approached  the 
controversy  without  bias  toward  class  or  subjection  to  self- 
interest.  These  in  general  took  the  view  that  Grant  had 
taken  of  the  greenbacks  and  the  public  debt,  and  that 
Hamilton  had  taken  of  the  Revolutionary  debt  which  he 
found  outstanding  when  he  became  Secretary  of  the  Treas 
ury  under  Washington.  From  the  grounds  of  highest  pub 
lic  expediency  it  was  wise  policy  for  the  Government  never 
to  take  advantage  of  a  technicality  in  its  own  interest,  and 
to  interpret  its  obligations  in  the  broadest  way.  Public 
credit  depends  upon  public  expectation  that  it  will  be  gen 
erously  maintained.  For  the  Government  deliberately  to 
force  cheap  money  into  circulation  appeared  to  these  not 
only  a  crime  against  honesty,  but  a  costly  departure  from 
sound  expediency.  It  was  deplorable  that  currency  should 
fluctuate  in  value,  but  it  would  be  criminal  to  produce  such 
fluctuation  for  the  purpose  of  transferring  wealth  from  one 
social  class  to  another. 

The  realignment  of  parties  with  free  silver  as  the  dom 
inant  issue  began  with  the  repeal  of  the  Sherman  Law.  It 
was  impeded  by  the  fact  that  free  silver  was  only  one  of  a 
long  list  of  reforms  urged  for  the  benefit  of  the  plain  people, 
and  that  many  of  these  reforms  were  inherently  sound. 
The  widespread  commercial  depression  affected  the  forces 
of  industry  as  well  as  those  of  agriculture.  While  farmers 
felt  that  they  had  lost  their  market,  workmen  knew  that 
they  had  lost  their  jobs.  The  existing  discontent  was 


196     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

wider  than  the  distribution  of  any  single  class,  and  the  dis 
contented  readily  believed  that  the  Government  was  in 
league  with  those  who  would  exploit  the  interests  of  the 
people. 

xThe  World's  Columbian  Exposition  was  opened  in  Chi 
cago  in  May,  1893,  under  conditions  resembling  those  amid 
World's  which  the  Centennial  Exhibition  had  been  held 
Columbian  in  Philadelphia,  in  1876.  Hard  times  prevented 
each  from  realizing  its  fullest  success  as  a  public 
spectacle.  A  comparison  of  the  exhibits,  however,  shows 
the  long  distance  that  the  United  States  had  traveled  in  less 
than  two  decades.  The  ugly,  straggling  warehouses  built 
in  Fairmount  Park  to  house  the  Centennial  bore  no  re 
semblance  to  the  wonder  city  that  sprang  into  life  around 
the  lagoons  at  Jackson  Park.  In  their  very  framework  the 
buildings  were  a  measure  of  the  revolution.  Structural 
steel  made  possible  at  Chicago  new  effects  in  size  and  shape. 
The  plaster  decorations,  here  used  for  the  first  time  on  a 
large  scale,  concealed  the  skeletons  and  gave  them  the  ap 
pearance  of  marble  palaces.  At  night  they  were  outlined 
by  living  fire  with  incandescent  lamps,  while  searchlights 
played  upon  them  from  all  directions.  For  the  first  time 
American  architecture  achieved  an  international  triumph. 

The  contents  of  the  buildings  were  as  significant  as  their 
externals.  In  the  fields  of  electricity  and  transportation 
they  showed  the  vast  change  since  the  last  world's  fair. 
The  trains  of  Pullman  and  Wagner  palace  cars  revealed  a 
luxury  in  travel  that  was  new.  Serious  visitors  relieved  the 
weariness  of  observation  by  attending  the  conferences  that 
were  held  on  all  conceivable  subjects.  The  more  frivolous 
spent  their  moments  in  relaxation  along  the  "Midway," 
where  they  found  amusements  ranging  from  Buffalo  Bill's 
"Wild  West"  to  the  "Streets  of  Cairo."  The  fair  was  less 
than  a  complete  success  because  of  the  effects  of  the  panic 
of  1893. 

The  open  revolt  of  the  farmers  against  the  conditions  of 
their  economic  life  was  paralleled  by  that  of  labor,  whose 
unrest  was  intensified  by  the  depression  and  panic.  In  the 


INDUSTRIAL  UNREST  197 

spring  of  1892  the  Nation  commented  upon  a  strike  among 
the  steel  workers  in  the  Pittsburgh  district  and  was  im 
pressed  by  the  novel  fact  that  public  sympathy  for  the 
strikers  appeared  among  all  classes  of  society.  The  well- 
to-do  had  generally  regarded  the  earlier  strikes  as  revolu 
tionary  outbreaks.  Public  opinion  was  changing  because 
-  the  Nation  thought  —  of  an  awakening  to  the  abuses 
incident  to  a  protective  system  under  the  domination  of 
manufacturers. 

The  Pittsburgh  strikes  of  1892  affected  the  Homestead 
Works  of  Andrew  Carnegie.  Since  the  close  of  the  Civil 
War  the  steel  industries  had  undergone  great  The  age 
changes  due  to  the  new  methods  of  making  steel  of  steel 
and  its  wholesale  application  in  industry.  The  steel  rail 
for  the  first  time  provided  the  steam  railroads  with  an  ade 
quate  bearing  surface  for  their  rolling  stock,  and  enabled 
them  to  increase  the  size  and  weight  of  locomotives  and 
cars,  to  lengthen  the  train  and  increase  its  tonnage  capacity. 
One  of  the  contributory  causes  of  the  strikes  of  1877  was 
the  growing  practice  of  running  double-header  trains,  with 
two  locomotives,  but  only  one  crew  of  trainmen.  The  re 
sulting  economy  was  coveted  by  the  railroads,  but  the 
trainmen's  unions  fought  the  practice  because  it  lessened 
the  number  of  jobs. 

With  steel  available  the  railroads  were  rebuilt  after  1879, 
and  the  new  electric  roads  that  supplanted  horse-cars  in 
city  streets  used  steel  rails  from  their  inception.  Bridges 
and  trestles  were  remodeled  with  the  new  material.  Wood, 
iron,  and  stone  became  only  supplementary  to  steel,  while 
cantilever  bridges  made  it  possible  to  carry  the  tracks  over 
obstacles  that  had  hitherto  been  impassable.  The  car-ferry 
lost  its  vogue  as  a  means  of  crossing  rivers.  The  Brook 
lyn  Bridge  was  the  best  known  of  the  new  monuments  of 
transportation,  and  in  most  of  the  large  cities  new  terminals 
with  huge  steel  train  sheds  made  their  appearance. 

City  architecture  entered  upon  a  new  era  with  the  appear 
ance  of  the  steel  truss.  The  limit  of  height  in  stone  or 
brick  construction  had  long  been  reached  in  the  cities  of 


198     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

Europe,  and  even  the  wide  use  of  the  passenger  elevator  did 
not  greatly  increase  it.  The  height  was  determined  by  the 
space  available  for  foundations  an^  supporting  walls,  and 
after  six  or  seven  stories  had  been  piled  up  these  became 
so  wide  that  further  building  was  prohibitive.  The  steel 
frame  made  it  possible  to  reduce  the  foundation  area,  and 
hang  the  walls  upon  the  metal  skeleton  instead  of  thicken 
ing  them  to  bear  the  burden.  The  maximum  height  rose 
at  once,  and  before  1890  office  buildings  appeared  in  New 
York,  described  by  contemporaries  as  ''sky-scrapers."  The 
twelve  or  fourteen  stories  of  the  first  sky-scrapers  were 
only  a  beginning  of  changes  that  altered  not  only  the  fun 
damental  conditions  of  city  life,  but  created  unlimited  de 
mand  for  steel  shapes. 

Naval  architecture  underwent  similar  changes  between 
1865  and  1890.  The  wooden  ship  that  had  formerly  car 
ried  the  commerce  of  the  world  was  forced  into  a  sub 
ordinate  position  first  by  iron  vessels  and  then  by  steel. 
The  navies  of  the  world  were  similarly  transformed  after 
the  duel  between  the  Monitor  and  the  Merrimac  exhibited 
the  fighting  strength  of  the  ironclad.  Before  1880  the 
United  States  had  no  steel  works  capable  of  manufacturing 
the  heavy  plates  of  steel  that  were  used  as  defensive  arma 
ment  or  the  huge  ingots  out  of  which  great  naval  guns  were 
forged  and  turned.  Before  1890  the  steel  industry  was 
ready  for  each  of  these  tasks. 

Pittsburgh  became  the  center  of  the  steel  industry  during 
the  eighties  because  of  its  fortunate  position  with  reference 
to  deposits  of  iron  and  coal  and  of  the  network  of  rail  and 
water  routes  that  gave  cheap  and  competitive  transporta 
tion.  The  steel  industry  did  not  show  as  much  trend  to 
ward  monopoly  as  did  petroleum.  There  was  no  single 
factor  whose  control  enabled  any  one  group  of  individuals 
to  dominate  the  industry.  Wealth  and  power  were  ac 
quired  by  the  men  most  skillful  in  handling  the  various 
factors  of  labor,  raw  materials,  and  transportation.  Among 
these,  Andrew  Carnegie  rose  to  the  leading  position. 

The  unionization  of  the  steel  industry  was  begun  sporad- 


INDUSTRIAL  UNREST  199 

ically  in  the  later  sixties  when  the  Sons  of  Vulcan  and  other 
craft  unions  appeared  among  the  mills.     In  1876    The  Home- 
several    of   these   unions   were   merged    in    the    steadstnke 
Amalgamated  Association  of  Iron  and  Steel  Workers.    In 
1892  the  Amalgamated  Association  began  a  strike  in  the 
Homestead  plant  of  the  Carnegie  Steel  Company. 

Carnegie  was  in  Europe  when  the  strike  broke  out,  while 
his  works  were  under  the  direct  management  of  one  of  his 
younger  associates,  Henry  Clay  Frick.  Had  Carnegie  been 
present  the  strike  might  have  been  compromised,  since  his 
general  policy  was  one  of  conciliation  toward  his  men. 
Frick,  however,  refused  to  yield.  -  The  demands  of  the  As 
sociation  were  in  part  for  their  recognition  by  the  company 
and  in  part  against  a  reduction  of  the  wages  for  piece-work. 
The  latter  controversy  was  common  in  all  industries  be 
cause  of  the  rapid  substitution  of  machinery  for  human 
labor.  When  the  piece-worker  was  aided  by  the  machine, 
he  desired  the  same  rate  with  a  resulting  increased  wage 
due  to  the  use  of  the  machine.  The  employer's  tendency 
was  to  lower  the  piece-rate  so  as  to  leave  the  weekly  wages 
of  the  workman  where  they  had  been. 

In  the  course  of  the  Homestead  strike  the  Amalgamated 
Association  picketed  the  works,  while  Frick  surrounded  them 
with  a  mob-proof  fence  and  prepared  to  bring  in  non-union 
men  or  scabs  to  break  the  strike.  As  an  additional  measure 
of  defense  he  employed  the  Pinkerton  Detective  Agency  to 
furnish  guards  for  the  mills.  On  July  6,  1892,  a  pitched 
battle  occurred  in  which  strikers  and  their  sympathizers 
attacked  a  boatload  of  Pinkerton  detectives  who  were  being 
convoyed  up  the  river  to  the  works.  The  Governor  of 
Pennsylvania  called  out  the  militia  to  maintain  order  and 
the  use  of  private  guards  was  denounced  by  most  of  the 
sympathizers  with  the  strikers. 

Public  sympathy  was  turned  against  the  strike  by  an  event 
for  which  the  Amalgamated  Association  had  no  responsi 
bility.  An  anarchist  named  Berkman  forced  his  way  into 
Frick's  office  and  sought  to  assassinate  him  with  knife  and 
revolver.  The  outrage  occurred  at  the  crisis  of  the  strike. 


200    RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

In  the  wave  of  revulsion  against  it  the  union  lost  its  cause. 

The  Homestead  strike  played  a  large  part  in  the  election 
of  1892,  serving  as  a  text  for  those  i^ho  sought  to  turn  labor 
against  the  Republican  Party  and  to  prove  a  corrupt  al 
liance  between  wealth  and  the  forces  of  the  Government. 
It  was  claimed  that  the  Republican  Party  was  insincere  in 
its  habitual  tariff  argument.  The  two  defenses  of  pro 
tection  were  to  make  America  independent  of  Europe  and  to 
protect  the  American  workman  against  the  competition  of 
low-grade  immigrant  labor.  The  Democratic  orator  now 
attacked  the  party  for  maltreating  and  shooting  up  the  work 
man  for  whom  it  professed  so  warm  an  interest. 

The  depression  of  1893  made  employment  scarce  and  re 
sulted  in  attempts  by  employers  to  lower  wages.  In  1894 
The  Pull-  the  most  notable  of  the  strikes  against  the  lower- 
man  strike  mg  Of  wages  occurred  in  the  environs  of  Chicago 
where  the  Pullman  Palace  Car  Company  had  built  a  model 
village  for  its  hands  at  Pullman.  The  wage  reductions 
carried  out  by  the  Pullman  Company  were  aggravated  by 
the  fact  that  the  workmen  lived  in  dwellings  owned  by  the 
company,  and  dealt  at  company  stores.  A  strike  broke  out 
in  May  for  the  restoration  of  the  old  wage  scale.  It  was 
supported  by  the  officers  of  the  American  Railway  Union, 
which,  under  the  leadership  of  Eugene  V.  Debs,  was  en 
deavoring  to  organize  all  workmen  on  the  railroads.  When 
the  Pullman  Company  refused  to  arbitrate  the  strike  the 
union  declared  a  boycott  upon  Pullman  cars  and  ordered 
its  members  not  to  haul  them  over  the  lines  of  any  railroad. 
In  the  last  week  of  June,  1894,  the  boycott  came  into  active 
operation  with  attendant  disorder  in  the  trainyards  of 
Chicago.  The  companies  appealed  to  the  federal  courts  for 
an  injunction  forbidding  the  American  Railway  Union  to 
interfere  with  the  running  of  trains.  Debs  disregarded  the 
order  and  was  thrown  into  jail  for  contempt  of  court.  The 
disorder  in  the  yards  continued,  and  a  call  was  made  for 
federal  troops  to  maintain  order,  but  Governor  Altgeld, 
of  Illinois,  declined  to  issue  the  call  for  troops  and  insisted 
that  he  had  the  matter  well  in  hand. 


INDUSTRIAL  UNREST  201 

When  the  disorder  in  the  trainyards  interfered  with  the 
regular  running  of  the  United  States  mails,  President 
Cleveland  intervened  on  his  own  account  and  ordered  fed 
eral  troops  from  Fort  Sheridan  to  Chicago  to  insure  their 
unimpeded  carriage. 

Out  of  the  industrial  disputes  between  1892  and  1894 
there  arose  wide  discussion  of  the  defense  of  society  against 
disorder.    Government  by  injunction  and  the  use    Govern- 
of  troops  were  both  defended  and  denounced,    pent  by 
They  were  denounced  by  those  who  saw  in  them 
a  corrupt  alliance  against  which  Henry  D.  Lloyd  launched 
his  economic  tract   Wealth  against  Commonwealth  (1894). 
The  courts  were  denounced  as  reactionary  and  servile  sup 
porters  of  organized  wealth.     The  use  of  the  injunction  and 
troops  was  defended  by  those  who  saw  a  primary  issue  in 
the  maintenance  of  order  and  believed  that  without  order 
as  a  condition  precedent  all  society  would  suffer,  the  wage- 
earner  most  of  all. 

The  place  of  the  court  in  the  American  system  of  govern 
ment  became  more  prominent  as  business  became  inter 
state  in  its  character  and  took  on  new  forms  of  combination. 
In  the  legislative  field  Congress  and  the  State  legislatures 
were  passing  regulatory  laws  under  strong  public  pressure. 
The  old  right  of  private  property  as  protected  by  the  com 
mon  law  underwent  modifications  as  the  police  power  of  the 
State  was  extended  in  new  directions.  It  was  no  new  thing 
for  the  courts  to  declare  acts  void  as  unconstitutional,  but 
there  had  been  no  occasion  for  numerous  decisions  of  this 
sort  until  the  Government  entered  the  broad  field  of  regula 
tion  of  business.  Critics  of  the  courts  because  they  inter 
vened  in  labor  disputes  found  themselves  joined  by  other 
critics  who  thought  the  courts  perverse  and  reactionary  and 
an  obstruction  to  the  social  advance  of  government. 

The  means  of  defense,  whether  internal  or  external,  had 
changed  little  in  the  half-century  ending  in  1894.  Local 
order  was  maintained  by  police  forces  that  were,  in  nearly 
every  important  city,  in  corrupt  alliance  with  the  party 
machine.  Individual  members  of  the  forces  showed  them- 


202     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

selves  repeatedly  capable  of  acts  of  heroism,  but  law-break 
ing  was  countenanced,  vice  was  protected,  and  bosses  levied 
regular  tribute  upon  the  activities  of  the  underworld.  The 
Lexow  Commission  in  New  York  stripped  the  concealment 
from  the  police  system  in  that  city  and  made  possible  in 
1894  one  of  the  spasmodic  revolts  of  decent  society  against 
corruption.  Theodore  Roosevelt  became  police  commis 
sioner  there  under  the  new  Administration,  and  with  Jacob 
Riis  as  his  Boswell  sought  to  remove  the  force  from  politics. 
The  condition  in  the  New  York  police  department  differed 
only  in  degree  from  that  in  other  cities.  In  the  rural  dis 
tricts  there  was  no  organized  police  at  all  and  public  order 
depended  upon  the  law-abiding  instincts  of  the  community 
reenforced  by  an  occasional  sheriff's  posse. 

Outside  of  half  a  dozen  larger  cities  there  existed  no  per 
manent  force  capable  of  quelling  serious  outbreaks.  When 
The  militia  trouble  occurred  the  governor  was  called  upon  to 
and  regular  summon  the  militia  to  the  scene  of  the  disturb 
ance,  but  the  militia  was  commonly  so  unpre 
pared  and  ill-disciplined  that  its  presence  before  a  mob  made 
the  situation  worse.  Only  in  the  great  industrial  States  in 
which  the  calls  for  strike  service  were  relatively  numerous 
was  the  militia  well  enough  trained  to  be  of  use.  Since 
strikes  constituted  almost  the  only  occasion  for  its  use,  it 
easily  became  an  object  of  the  distrust  of  organized  labor. 
In  one  of  the  strikes  of  1893  the  local  controversy  approached 
a  condition  of  a  petty  civil  war  when  a  sheriff's  posse  in 
Colorado  sought  to  quiet  striking  miners  in  Cripple  Creek 
and  Governor  Waite  called  out  the  militia  to  arrest  the 
posse. 

The  United  States  Army,  as  the  last  recourse  for  defense 
in  an  emergency,  ranked  high  in  public  esteem.  The  regular 
soldiers  were  disciplined  and  self-restrained  and  aroused 
fewer  antipathies  than  militiamen.  The  army  was  not 
materially  changed  from  its  condition  when  Hayes  with 
drew  it  from  the  Southern  States.  In  1894  it  comprised 
2136  officers  and  25,772  men,  and  the  bureaus  in  the  War 
Department  which  directed  it  had  performed  their  customary 


INDUSTRIAL  UNREST  203 

regime  with  little  change  through  two  decades.  The  line  of 
great  commanders  was  running  down.  The  title  of  General 
of  the  Army,  conferred  upon  Grant  and  Sherman,  lapsed 
with  them,  although  it  was  temporarily  revived  for  Grant's 
benefit  shortly  before  his  death.  After  Grant  and  Sher 
man  the  command  of  the  army  passed  into  Sheridan's  hands, 
and  on  his  death  in  1888  the  list  of  great  names  ends.  Scho- 
field,  and  then  Miles,  exercised  command  for  the  next 
fifteen  years,  but  there  were  no  more  great  heroes  of  the 
Civil  War  to  lend  the  luster  of  their  names  to  the  office  of 
commanding  general. 

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL  NOTE 

Benjamin  Harrison,  shortly  after  his  retirement,  published  a  popular 
description  of  the  National  Government  in  This  Country  of  Ours  (1897); 
Henry  Demarest  Lloyd,  Wealth  against  Commonwealth  (1894),  is  an  attack 
upon  business  organization  in  general  and  the  trusts  in  particular.  James 
Howard  Bridge,  The  Inside  History  of  the  Carnegie  Steel  Company  (1903),  is 
an  interesting  special  study,  as  are  Carroll  D.  Wright,  "The  Amalgamated 
Association  of  Iron  and  Steel  Workers,"  in  Quarterly  Journal  of  Economics, 
vol.  vii,  and  Andrew  Carnegie,  Autobiography  (1920).  T.  S.  Adams  and 
H.  L.  Sumner,  Labor  Problems  (1905),  is  a  convenient  summary.  Brand 
Whitlock,  Forty  Years  of  It  (1914),  gives  a  sympathetic  view  of  Governor 
Altgeld's  problems.  Charles  A.  Beard,  Contemporary  American  History 
(1914),  devotes  much  space  to  a  discussion  of  the  growing  power  of  the 
courts.  The  basic  figures  for  the  silver  controversy  are  in  Secretary  of 
the  Treasury,  Annual  Report,  1893. 


CHAPTER  XXI 

THE  DEMOCRATIC  SCHISM 

IN  his  second  inaugural  address  Cleveland  laid  greatest 
stress  upon  two  problems  before  his  Administration;  one, 
the  immediate  need,  was  the'maintenance  of  a  "sound  and 
stable  currency";  the  second,  which  was  the  main  purpose 
of  his  campaign,  was  to  correct  "the  injustice  of  maintain 
ing  protection  for  protection's  sake."  Before  it  was  possi 
ble  to  take  up  his  major  task,  the  emergency  of  the  panic  of 
1893  drove  him  to  demand  the  repeal  of  the  Silver  Purchase 
Act.  This  was  accomplished  on  November  i ,  by  which  date 
the  most  acute  period  of  the  crisis  was  over.  When  Con 
gress  reassembled  in  December  to  consider  the  tariff  bill, 
which  William  L.  Wilson  was  ready  to  report,  the  organism 
of  the  party  was  so  wrenched  because  of  the  silver  contro 
versy  that  it  was  in  no  condition  to  function  smoothly  upon 
tariff  revision. 

At  least  four  sets  of  obstructive  facts  stood  before  the 
President  as  he  prepared  to  induce  his  party  to  redeem  its 
Democratic  pledge  to  revise  the  tariff.  The  political  conse/- 
campaign  quences  of  industrial  unrest  told  against  him. 
The  direct  effect  of  the  repeal  of  the  Sherman 
Act  was  to  weaken  the  party  unity  from  within.  The 
growth  of  Populism  operated  from  without  the  party  to  se 
duce  Democrats  from  their  allegiance,  and  finally  the  panic 
itself  was  a  weapon  to  be  used  with  telling  effect  by  the 
Republican  Party  now  in  opposition. 

Industrial  unrest  had  contributed  to  Cleveland's  election,  • 
but  its  continuance  after  his  inauguration  worked  to  his 
detriment.  The  mass  of  unemployed  workmen  tended  to 
hold  him  responsible  for  their  distress.  The  promptness 
with  which  the  President  intervened  during  the  Pullman 
strikes  brought  down  upon  his  head  the  wrath  of  labor 
radicals  and  of  liberal  Democrats. >  -John  P.  Altgeld,  of 


THE  DEMOCRATIC  SCHISM  205 

Illinois,  gave  voice  to  the  protest  against  what  he  believed 
to  be  federal  usurpation  in  State  affairs.  He  had  already 
drawn  attention  to  his  extreme  liberalism  by  pardoning  a 
group  of  the  anarchists  convicted  after  the  Chicago  riots 
of  1886.  His  protests  revealed  a  lack  of  unity  within  the* 
Democratic  Party.  The  character  of  the  unrest  is  illus 
trated  by  the  movement  originated  by  Jacob  S.  CoxeyJ. 
of  Massillon,  Ohio,  who  invited  the  unemployed  tor  start 
with  him  on  Easter  Sunday,  1894,  to  march  upon  Washing- 
ton  and  to  carry  to  Congress  in  person  their  demands  for  re 
lief.  Little  detachments  of  "Coxey's  army"  started  from 
numerous  parts  of  the  United  States  and  ultimately  arrived 
in  Washington,  where  the  Capitol  police  arrested  them  for \ 
walking  on  the  grass  around  the  Capitol.  Their  protest, 
fizzled  to  the  level  of  comic  opera,  but  the  grievance  did  not 
evaporate  with  the  movement. 

The  repeal  of  the  Sherman  Act  snapped   many  of  the 
party  relationships  that  had  been  prepared  with  reference  to 

tariff  revision.     Until  1893  the  party  had  tried  to 

.  ,  ,    .      .  -i         •  •    ^          i-  -  -,     Effect  of 

avoid  bringing  the  silver  issue  into  politics,  and    the  repeal 

had    formulated    ambiguous    and    inconsistent  *of  the  Sher 
man  Act 
platform  planks  upon  the  subject.     The  desire 

for   free   silver,    however,    was   nearly   unanimous   among 
Southern  and  Western  Democrats,  many  of  whom  lost  their' 
confidence  in  Cleveland  when  they  thought  of  him  as  the 
agent  of  Wall  Street  and  in  league  with  the  " gold-bugs." 
The  appeal  of  Populism  was  strengthened  by  the  success 
of  the  People's  Party  in  the  election  of  1892.      This  was 
most  marked  among  the  Western  States,  where    Successes 
fusion  tickets  were  placed  in  the  field  and  elected    of  the 
by  a  Populist-Democratic  combination.      The 
program  of  Populism  embraced  a  long  list  of  genuine  reforms, 
overshadowed  by  the  demand  for  silver  inflation.     It  was 
cardinal  doctrine  with  the  Populists  that  both  great  parties 
were  derelict  in  their  duties  and  sold  out  the  interests  of  the 
common   people.     Professional  politicians  were  under  the 
ban,  as  having  been  guilty  of  deception  and  betrayal.  The 
Populists  who  were  nominated  for  office  were,  as  a  conse- 


206    RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

quence,  inexperienced  men.  Their  honesty  and  devotion  to 
reform  were  generally  unquestioned,  but  their  experience 
in  the  practical  management  of  ^government  was  slight. 
They  at  least  were  a  protest  to  double-dealing.  "It  has 
become  much  the  fashion  to  run  candidates  on  two  or  more 
diverse  platforms,  so  they  can  be  for  a  gold  standard  in  one 
locality,  free  coinage  of  silver  in  another,  and  something  else 
elsewhere,"  wrote  an  Iowa  Congressman  upon  the  general 
situation.  In  their  conduct  in  office  the  inexperience  of 
Populist  officials  made  them  the  butt  of  Eastern  paragraph- 
ers.  Waite,  of  Colorado,  whose  frequent  use  of  militia 
and  whose  high-flown  language  opened  him  to  attack,  was 
perhaps  most  widely  known.  But  Peffer,  of  Kansas,  and 
"Sockless"  Jerry  Simpson  were  burlesqued  and  ridiculed, 
while  their  sincere  attempts  to  carry  out  the  Populist  re 
forms  were  sneered  at  and  opposed.  Said  the  New  York 
Nation,  which  was  never  able  to  appreciate  either  their 
provocation  or  their  aims,  "the  whole  course  of  Populist 
reasoning  and  action  in  Kansas  has  betokened  rascality 
rather  than  ignorance." 

The  panic  that  Harrison  evaded  with  dexterity  and 
passed  on  to  Cleveland  was  chiefly  due  to  a  long  train  of 
events  for  which  neither  party  as  such  was  responsible.  It 
was  used,  however,  as  a  reason  for  attacking  the  Democratic 
Party,  which  was  in  office  when  it  broke.  In  later  years, 
as  Republican  stump  speakers  became  more  hazy  in  their 
recollection  of  the  sequence  of  events,  it  was  habitually 
charged  that  the  panic  of  1893  was  due  to  the  Democratic 
tariff  of  1894.  Burrows,  of  Michigan,  expressed  the  same 
idea  before  that  tariff  was  passed :  "  I  confidently  assert  that 
if  the  election  of  1892  had  resulted  in  the  retention  of  the 
Republican  Party  in  power,  accompanied  as  it  would  have 
been  with  the  assurance  of  the  continuance  of  the  American 
policy  of  Protection,  the  effect  upon  the  public  revenues  as 
well  as  the  general  prosperity  of  the  country  would  have 
been  entirely  reversed." 

The  natural  consequence  of  the  panic  made  tariff  revision 
difficult  if  not  impossible.  The  national  surplus  disappeared, 


THE  DEMOCRATIC  SCHISM  207 

declining  from  $57,000,000  in  1890  to  $37,000,000  in  1891, 
$9,000,000  in  1892,  and  $2,000,000  in  1893.    In    The  state 
the  fiscal  year  ending  June  30,  1894,  there  was    of  the 
a  deficit  of  $69,000,000.    The  causes  which  drove 
the  Treasury  into  deficit  finance  were  contributed  to  by  the 
heavy  appropriations  of  Reed's  billion-dollar  Congress,  by 
the  elimination  of  the  sugar  duties  from  the  McKinley  Bill,* 
and  by  the  normal  cessation  of  imports  that  accompanies 
every  panic.    The  customs  duties  under  the  McKinley  tariff 
were  $219,000,000  in  1891,  $177,000,000  in  1892,  $203,000- 
ooo  in  1893,  and  $131,000,000  in  1894. 

By  the  end  of  1893  it  was  a  problem  for  Secretary  Car 
lisle  to  find  funds  for  the  running  expenses  of  the  Govern 
ment.  It  was  a  task  of  different  character  to  keep  enough 
gold  in  the  Treasury  to  make  possible  the  exchange  of  gold 
for  other  forms  of  money  at  the  option  of  the  customer.  In 
January,  1894,  ne  reverted  to  the  Resumption  Act  of  1875 
and  took  advantage  of  its  unrepealed  provisions  for  borrow 
ing  gold  in  order  to  create  a  gold  reserve.  Under  this  law 
John  Sherman  financed  resumption  in  1879.  Carlisle  now 
invited  bids  for  a  bond  issue  of  $50,000,000,  whose  proceeds 
were  to  strengthen  the  gold  reserve.  In  subsequent  issues 
of  $50,000,000  borrowed  and  $62,000,000  paid  out  directly 
in  the  purchase  of  gold,  the  indebtedness  created  to  main 
tain  the  reserve  was  increased  to  $162,000,000.  The  task 
was  vexatious  and  burdensome.  The  Silver  Purchase  Act 
had  been  repealed  and  had  accordingly  ceased  to  encourage 
the  withdrawal  of  gold  from  the  Treasury.  But  the  Civil 
War  greenbacks  were  still  in  circulation  and  by  law  were  re 
issued  when  received  by  the  Treasury.  Instead  of  being 
redeemed  once  in  gold,  they  were  reissued  and  were  re 
peatedly  turned  in  for  redemption ;  and  as  long  as  lack  of 
confidence  prevailed  they  were  a  continuous  drain  upon  the 
reserve.  The  bond  issues  were  only  a  palliative.  Relief 
came  of  itself  as  times  gradually  became  more  prosperous. 

The  Democratic  borrowing  to  maintain  the  gold  reserve 
was  attacked  by  Populists  and  silver  Democrats  as  sub-  ( 
servience  to  Wall  Street.     J.  Pierpont  Morgan,  who  nego-  J 


208    RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

tiated  the  loans,  gained  the  comple-te  confidence  of  President 
Cleveland  in  the  transaction,  but  gained  for  himself  the 
position  of  dominant  exponent  o[  the  banking  interests. 
Until  his  death  in  1913  he  remained  the  leader  in  American 
finance.  Republicans  refused  to  believe  that  the  bond  is 
sues  were  for  the  sole  purpose  of  sustaining  the  gold  reserve, 
and  attacked  Cleveland  for  increasing  the  national  debt  in 
time  of  peace,  and  forjlejiiaiidin^-ar^^e^^ 
whenjjigre  \vas  already  a,jJ£fi£JtJj3-4h£_Ij'easurv. 

William  L.  Wilson  opened  the  tariff  debate  in  January, 
1894,  and  carried  his  measure  through  the  House  in  the^fbl- 
The  Wilson  lowing  month  in  the  form  of  an  honest  reduction 
tariff  of  of  the  tariff.  In  the  Senate,  where  the  party 

lines  were  closer,  and  where  the  Western  Demo 
crats  already  believed  that  Cleveland  had  become  the  tool 
of  big  business,  there  was  open  revolt  against  the  bill.  Re 
publicans  attacked  it  with  ridicule  as  they  had  done  in  1888, 
and  charged  an  incapacity  in  Democrats  to  construct  a  tariff. 
"The  framers  of  the  Wilson  Bill  having  classified  hydraulic 
hose  .  .  .  among  articles  of  wearing  apparel,"  said  one  of  the 
Republican  Senators,  "no  doubt  will  remodel  that  extraor 
dinary  measure  so  as  to  include  hydraulic  rams  and  spin 
ning-mules  in  the  live-stock  schedule."  A  group  of  Demo 
cratic  Senators  openly  allied  themselves  with  the  Republican 
minority  to  defeat  the  revision.  Arthur  Pue  Gorman,  of 
Maryland,  and  Calvin  Brice,  of  Ohio,  led  in  the  breach  and 
made  it  more  glaring,  because  each  of  them  had  been  chair 
man  of  the  Democratic  National  Committee.  W7itli^ou th 
em  and  Western  party  leaders  fighting  him  on  the  silver 
issue,  and  withEasjern  leaders  j 


CleyelajKLbgcame  a  President  withoujLajparty.  The  Wilson 
Bill  emerged  from  the  Senate  as  an  ordinary'log-rolling,  tar 
iff-tinkering  measure,  bearing  no  resemblance  to  the  party 
pledge  upon  which  Cleveland  had  been  elected.  In  its  later 
stages  Cleveland  intervened  in  the  hope  of  checking  the  re 
volt.  In  an  open  letter  to  Wilson  he  renewed  the  arguments 
of  his  tariff  message  of  1887  and  described  the  pending 
measure  as  "party  perfidy  and  party  dishonor."  Cleveland 


THE  DEMOCRATIC  SCHISM  209 

refused  to  sign  the  Wilson  Bill.     He  allowed  it  to  become  a 
law  without  his  signature  because  of  the  financial  condition 
of  the  Treasury  and  the  lack  of  prospect  of  a  better  bill. 
His  open  indignation  made  his  personal  breach  with  the] 
Democratic  protectionists  permanent. 

The  greatest  novelty  included  in  the  Wilson  Bill  was 
a  provision  for  an  income  tax  inserted  in  response  to  aV- 
demand  of  the  Populists7and~~^fafted  in  part  by  William )  \ 
J.  Bryan,  who  was  one  of  the  junior  members  of  the  Com-    / 
mittee  on  Ways  and  Means.     In  the  scheme  of  Populism  an 
income  tax  was  not  only  a  means  for  raising  a  revenue,  but  it 
was  also  a  device  for  correcting  inequalities  in  the  distribu 
tion  of  wealth.     By  increasing  the  rate  progressively  upon 
large  incomes  wealth  was  to  be  made  to  carry  a  heavy  share 
of  national  expense.     The  measure  was  fought  in  Congress 
and  outside  as  class  legislation.     In  spite  of  the  fact  that 
income  taxes  had  been  used  throughout  the  Civil  War,  the 
constitutionality  of  this  new  measure  was  tested  in  the 
Supreme  Court.      The  Constitution  required   that  direct 
taxes  be  allotted  among  the  States  according  to  their  popu 
lation.     In  this  income  tax  there  was  no  such  allotment  and 
none  could  have  been  made,  since  the  great  incomes  which 
were  the  objective  of  the  measure  were  concentrated  in  a 
few  large  cities  in  the  East.     The  Supreme  Court  in  18951 
overturned  the  income  tax  because  of  its  unconstitutional-  J 
ity,  and  brought  itself  thereby  within  the  range  of  Populist 
fire  directed  against  the  alleged  conspiracy  of  business  to 
control  the  government. 

In  the  fall  elections  of  1894  the  Republican  Party  was 
returned  to  power  in  Congress  with  a  huge  majority  in  the 
House  and  a  plurality  over  the  Democrats  in  the    The  elec_ 
Senate.     The  panic  and  the  Wilson  Bill  were  the    tions  of 
main  objects  of  attack.     The  Republican  leaders 
invaded  Wilson's  West  Virginia  district,  where  Stephen  B. 
Elkins  directed  the  movement  to  defeat  the  nominal  author 
of  the  bill.     Ex:President  Harrison  took  part  in  the  attack, 
as  did  McKinley,  who  had  himself  been  ousted  from  Con 
gress  after  the  passage  of  his  tariff  measure.     Wilson  was 


210     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

defeated  for  reelection  and  at  the  same  time  a  reaction 
against  Populism  removed  from  office  its  most  prominent 
leaders.  i  ^1 

In  the  latter  half  of  Cleveland's  Administration  the  con 
duct  of  the  Government  was  reduced  to  formal  terms  as 
The  Vene-  always  when  Congress  and  the  President  are  at 
zuela  dis-  variance  on  politics.  In  December,  1895,  there 
was  temporarily  revived  a  spirit  of  unity  be 
cause  of  a  vigorous  diplomatic  attack  made  upon  Great 
Britain  in  a  minor  South  American  case.  The  boundary 
between  Venezuela  and  British  Guiana  had  been  a  source  of 
irritation  for  many  years,  and  Venezuela  had  more  than 
once  invited  the  friendly  offices  of  the  United  States  to  pro 
tect  her  against  the  encroachment  of  her  more  powerful 
neighbor.  Cleveland  took  up  the  discussion  through 
\  Richard  Olney,  who  had  in  1895  become  Secretary  of  State 
upon  the  death  of  Gresham,  and  urged  upon  England  an 
arbitration  which  that  country  was  unwilling  to  concede. 
In  the  course  of  the  correspondence  Olney  avowed  a  special 
American  right  and  interest  in  the  problems  of  the  Western 
Hemisphere,  basing  his  claim  upon  the  Monroe  Doctrine. 
The  British  Government  repudiated  the  idea  and  an  im 
passe  was  reached  in  the  autumn.  On  December  17,  1895, 
after  Cleveland  had  sent  a  routine  message  at  the  opening 
of  Congress  a  few  days  earlier,  he  startled  the  world  with  a 
I  special  message  on  Venezuela  in  which  he  asked  for  authority 
Ito  make  a  study  of  the  merits  of  the  boundary  controversy 
with  a  view  to  intervention  to  maintain  that  boundary 
which  should  be  sustained  by  law  and  fact.  He  recognized 
that  this  might  produce  a  conflict  with  England  which  he 
was  ready  if  necessary  to  undertake. 

The  sharp  language  of  the  Venezuela  message  bewildered 
both  friends  and  critics  of  the  President.  Godkin,  who  had 
supported  him  in  the  Nation  thus  far,  now  turned  against 
him.  Republicans  charged  that  it  was  only  a  partisan 
trick  to  strengthen  his  Administration;  Populists  believed 
that  it  was  a  part  of  the  Wall  Street  conspiracy,  and  that 
the  temporary  panic  which  followed  the  news  of  the  mes- 


THE  DEMOCRATIC  SCHISM  211 

sage  was  deliberately  planned  for  the  benefit  of  speculators. 
Cleveland  himself  appears  to  have  believed  that  sharp  lan 
guage  would  produce  not  war,  but  compromise,  and  the 
ensuing  facts  sustained  this  belief.     The  American  commis- , 
sioners  to  study  the  Venezuela  boundary  were  given  every  ) 
chance  to  examine  the  records  of  the  British  Foreign  Office 
itself,  as  they  studied  their  subject.     In  the  following  winter, 
partly  as  the  result  of  the  shock  caused  by  a  serious  con 
templation   of  a  war  between   England   and   the   United 
States,  a  general  trea^y_o^Mtrdfion^was  signed  by  Qlney 
and  Lord  Pauncefote! A~few  weeks  later,  in  February,  \ 
1897,    England    agreed   with   Venezuela   to   arbitrate   the! 
boundary  dispute.     The  arbitration  treaty  with  the  United 
States  aroused    opposition    in   the  Senate   and    was    first 
amended  to  death  and  then  defeated.     But  the  cordial  rela 
tions  between  England  and  the  United  States  were  strength 
ened  rather  than  weakened  by  the  episode. 

If  it  haol  been  necessary  for  Cleveland  to  resort  to  force 
to  defend  his  attitude  upon  Venezuela,  he  would  have  had 
as  weapons  an  uncompleted  system  of  coast  defenses  on  the 
Atlantic  planned  by  Secretary  Endicott's  board  in  1886,  'a 
regular  army  of  little  over  25,000,  a  national  guard  of  vary-' 
ing  degrees  of  unpreparedness,  and  one  modern  battleship.- 
"The  utterly  defenseless  condition  of  our  seacoast  ...  is 
now  well  understood  by  every  civilized  nation  in  the  world," 
wrote  Secretary  Endicott  in  1886.  The  naval  vessels  were* 
openly  jeered  at  in  the  comic  papers.  "A  man  who  will  go' 
right  out  on  the  water  in  an  American  man-of-war  does  n't 
know  what  fear  is,"  said  Leslie's  in  1882,  when  the  first 
steps  were  being  taken  to  rebuild  the  navy. 

The  American  navy  at  the  close  of  the  Civil  War  had  no 
superior,  but  its  units  deteriorated  in  the  years  that  fol 
lowed,  and  popular  indifference  prevented  the    The  new 
addition  of  new  ships.     While  the  rest  of  the    American 
world  was  experimenting  with  armored  cruisers 
and  heavy  guns  in  the  seventies,  the  United  States  was 
content  to  rely  upon  the  obsolete  vessels  that  had  been 
modern  in  1865.     In  1882  there  was  no  American  warship 


212     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

fit  to  go  to  war.  In  this  year,  however,  Congress  author 
ized  the  preparation  of  plans  for  a  group  of  steel  cruisers 
and  in  subsequent  acts  the  birth  of  a  new  navy  was  author 
ized.  A  new  American  industry  had  to  be  created  before 
the  navy  could  appear.  The  ideas  of  protection,  that  were 
crying  more  insistently  for  economic  independence  of 
Europe,  forbade  the  purchase  of  a  navy  abroad.  It  ac 
cordingly  became  necessary  to  provide  armor-plate  mills 
and  gun  foundries  as  well  as  to  design  the  steel  hulls  that 
were  to  bear  the  ordnance.  Three  little  unprotected 
cruisers,  the  Atlanta,  Chicago,  Charleston,  and  a  lighter 
craft,  the  Dolphin,  "constituted  the  first  attempt  of  the 
Navy  Department  for  many  years  to  construct  a  war  ves 
sel  up  to  the  modern  requirements."  The  earliest  of  the 
cruisers  was  commissioned  in  1887.  In  the  autumn  of  this 
year  the  Atlanta  and  the  Dolphin  engaged  in  what  were 
called  maneuvers  in  an  attack  at  Newport,  where  a  Naval 
War  College  had  been  brought  into  existence  in  1885. 

From  its  first  units  of  unprotected  light  cruisers  the  naval 
program  developed  into  armored  cruisers,  and  then  to 
battleships,  whose  plate  and  guns  were  manufactured  in 
the  United  States.  The  Indiana  was  the  earliest  of  the  new 
craft  to  be  commissioned,  coming  into  active  service  in 
November,  1895.  The  Massachusetts,  Oregon,  and  Iowa 
were  under  construction  in  the  yards,  but  would  have  been 
unavailable  had  war  occurred  with  England  in  1895. 

A  part  of  the  scheme  for  modernizing  the  navy  included  a 
Naval  War  College  for  the  post-graduate  instruction  of  naval 
officers.  Stephen  B.  Luce  was  detailed  to  command  the  new 
enterprise,  which  opened  its  first  session  in  1885.  The  great 
est  service  of  Luce,  who  organized  the  college,  was  to  sum 
mon  thither  Alfred  Thayer  Mahan,  who  at  the  age  of  forty- 
five  "was  drifting  on  the  lines  of  simple  respectability  as 
aimlessly  as  any  one  very  well  could."  Mahan  took  his 
duties  seriously,  began  to  lecture  on  naval  history  in  the  fall 
of  1886,  and  a  few  years  later  produced,  in  The  Influence  of 
Sea-Power  upon  History  ( 1 890) ,  the  most  important  contribu 
tion  of  his  generation  to  the  philosophy  of  national  strength. 


THE  DEMOCRATIC  SCHISM  213 


BIBLIOGRAPHICAL  NOTE 

A  good  general  view  of  the  period  may  be  constructed  from  James  Ford 
Rhodes,  History  of  the  United  States,  vol.  vm;  D.  R.  Dewey,  National 
Problems  (1907);  and  Paul  L.  Haworth,  The  United  States  in  Our  Own 
Times  (1920).  Grover  Cleveland,  Presidential  Problems  (1904),  discusses 
and  defends  the  bond  issues.  A.  D.  Noyes,  Thirty  Years  of  American 
Finance  (1898),  is  by  a  veteran  financial  writer.  J.  M.  Gould  and  G.  F. 
Tucker,  The  Federal  Income  Tax  Explained  (1895),  lost  its  timeliness  when 
the  tax  was  declared  unconstitutional.  William  F.  Draper,  Recollections 
of  a  Varied  Career  (1908).  gives  a  manufacturer's  view  of  the  nineties. 
A.  T.  Mahan,  From  Sail  to  Steam  (1907),  is'  the  autobiography  of  the 
leading  naval  historian.  G.  W.  Steevens,  The  Land  of  the  Dollar  (1897),  is 
a  crisp,  journalistic  record  of  an  American  tour. 


CHAPTER  XXII 
THE  FIRST  McKINLEY  CAMPAIGN,  1896 

THE  "stirring  events  in  our  foreign  relations"  that  occurred 
during  the  administration  of  Cleveland  involved  the  Presi 
dent  in  much  controversy  and  reenforced  the  efforts  to 
place  the  navy  upon  a  modern  basis,  but  had  no  "influence 
in  shaping  the  canvass  of  1896,  or  in  determining  its  re 
sult."  Before  the  Congress  chosen  in  November,  1894, 
took  its  seat,  Cleveland  had  lost  the  hold  over  his  party 
to  which  his  reelection  was  due  and  had  become  an  execu 
tive  unable  to  direct  the  course  of  current  affairs.  The 
opposition  party  was  intent  upon  assembling  the  parti 
san  materials  to  be  used  in  regaining  national  control; 
the  Democracy  was  hopelessly  split  and  without  a  leader; 
and  along  the  western  horizon  the  gathering  power  of  the 
People's  Party  threatened  to  retire  one  of  the  two  major 
parties  into  obscurity. 

Protection  was  the  bond  that  held  the  Republican  Party 
organization  together  after  1887.  Until  the  date  of  Cleve 
land's  memorable  tariff  message  it  was  a  gen- 
arid  the*0'  eral  custom  to  apologize  for  the  tariff  as  it  had 
standard  ^Y  accident  become.  From  that  date  the  party 
tactics  changed,  and  the  intent  was  openly 
avowed  to  make  protection  more  systematic  and  complete 
than  it  had  ever  been.  The  defeat  <?f  Cleveland  in  1888 
made  it  possible  for  this  purpose  to  b§  executed  in  the 
McKinley  Bill  of  1890;  the  defeat  of  Republican  candidates 
in  the  ensuing  elections  raised  a  doubt  as  to  the  degree  in 
which  the  people  approved  the  policy,  but  only  strength 
ened  the  determination  of  the  Republican  organization  to 
perfect  its  own  articulation  upon  this  issue.  For  the  first 
time  since  plantation  economics  controlled  the  policy  of  the 
Democratic  Party  in  the  middle  of  the  century,  a  situation 
had  arisen  in  which  the  success  of  one  party  appeared  to  be 


THE  FIRST  McKINLEY  CAMPAIGN,  1896       215 

synonymous  with  the  business  success  of  a  group  of  power 
ful  interests.  The  protected  manufacturer  connected  his 
prosperity  with  the  tariff  schedules.  His  financial  interest  in 
the  result  of  elections  and  the  tariff*  alterations  that  might 
follow  them  developed  an  extensive  source  of  campaign  con 
tributions  to  the  Republican  treasury.  The  efforts  of  John 
Wanamaker  in  raising  funds  from  Eastern  manufacturers 
who  feared  the  success  of  Cleveland  in  1888  had  been  ante 
dated  several  years  by  those  of  Marcus  A.  Hanna,  of  Cleve 
land,  who  was  raising  funds  earlier  in  the  decade  on  the 
theory  that  the  manufacturer  had  an  insurable  interest  in 
Republican  success. 

The  set-back  of  1890  and  the  further  rebuff  of  1892  post 
poned,  but  did  not  weaken,  the  Republican  hopes  for  a  con 
tinuance  of  the  McKinley  idea.  In  defense  of  protection 
the  arguments  became  standardized  before  1895.  Clay's 
defense  of  an  American  system  was  accepted  in  toto.  The 
protectionist  regarded  it  as  discreditable  that  the  United 
States  should  import  any  commodity  susceptible  of  pro 
duction  in  America.  Time  had  added  to  the  arguments 
of  Clay  a  second  principle,  that  the  American  standard  of 
life  must  not  be  endangered  by  the  competition  of  foreign 
countries  with  a  lower  scale  of  welfare.  As  the  arguments 
were  used  upon  the  stump,  the  protection  of  the  American 
workman  against  the  ''pauper  labor"  of  Europe  was  made 
the  dominant  motive  for  the  policy.  Free  trade  was  de 
scribed  as  a  British  trick  to  secure  foreign  markets  for 
British  manufactures,  and  the  Democratic  policy  of  tariff 
reform  was  attacked  as  unpatriotic  and  un-American. 
The  Cobden  Club,  a  British  free-trade  organization,  was 
named  repeatedly  in  the  tariff  debates  from  1884  to  1892, 
always  with  the  charge  that  it  was  the  agency  whereby 
British  gold  aided  the  proposals  of  the  Democratic  Party. 
The  unfortunate  letter  of  Sackville-West  to  Murchison  in 
1888  was  all  that  most  Republicans  needed  to  prove  this 
point. 

The  McKinley  Bill  precipitated  disaster  upon  the  Re 
publican  Party,  but  produced  a  martyr  for  its  rehabilita- 


2i6     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

tion.  William  McKinley,  author  of  the  bill,  and  the  most 
McKinley  adequate  of  Republican  legislators  on  protection, 
and  was  defeated  for  reelection  in  1890.  To  the 

protection 

country  at  large  it  appeared  that  he  had  been 

marked  for  slaughter  because  of  his  tariff  leadership  as 
William  L.  W'ilson  was  actually  destroyed  in  1894.  The 
fact  was  that  McKinley  had  been  selected  for  defeat  long 
before  his  measure  became  a  law.  The  close  balance  of 
Ohio  politics  produced  in  the  eighties  an  alternation  of 
Democratic  and  Republican  control,  with  the  result  that 
four  successive  apportionment  acts  were  passed  under  the 
census  of  1880.  In  each  of  these  the  party  in  control  of 
the  legislature  sought  to  gerrymander  the  Congressional 
districts  so  as  to  gain  more  Congressmen  than  the  propor 
tional  vote  of  the  party  would  warrant.  In  such  an  act 
passed  by  a  Democratic  legislature  McKinley 's  home 
county,  in  which  a  Republican  majority  was  assured,  was 
attached  to  a  group  of  adjacent  Democratic  counties  whose 
aggregate  Democratic  pluralities  were  known  to  be  great 
enough  to  procure  a  Democratic  majority  for  the  new 
district.  McKinley  was  gerrymandered  out  of  his  seat, 
but  was  a  good  enough  martyr  for  party  purposes.  He  was 
elected  governor  of  Ohio  the  following  year  and  reflected 
two  years  later.  WThen  the  panic  of  1893  brought  distress 
to  all  the  country,  it  was  ascribed  to  the  rejection  of  the 
policies  to  which  his  name  was  attached,  and  his  friends 
urged  him  for  the  presidency  as  "the  advance  agent  of 
prosperity." 

Marcus  A.  Hanna  was  the  chief  promoter  of  McKinley 's 
political  fortunes.  Drawn  to  him  by  the  unusual  affection 
Hanna  and  tnat  McKinley  inspired  among  his  associates, 
the  Ohio  Hanna  devoted  his  time,  his  money,  and  his 

statesmen  ,.   . 

political  shrewdness  to  the  advancement  of  his 
friend's  cause.  The  other  Ohio  statesmen  who  had  am 
bitions  for  the  presidency,  Joseph  B.  Foraker  and  John 
Sherman,  were  forced  aside,  while  McKinley  was  groomed 
for  the  campaign  of  1896  as  the  martyr  of  the  McKinley 
Bill  and  the  spokesman  of  protection. 


THE  FIRST  McKINLEY  CAMPAIGN,  1896        217 

The  devices  by  which  Hanna  gained  popular  favor  for 
McKinley  appear  to  have  been  those  of  the  successful  pol 
itician  of  the  school  of  Dorsey,  Quay,  and  Platt.  In  those 
aspects  of  the  campaign  in  which  personal  influence  could 
be  effective,  McKinley's  charm  of  manner  could  be  trusted 
to  produce  results.  The  accumulation  of  potential  dele 
gates  to  the  Republican  Convention  of  1896  was  begun  long 
before  the  State  conventions  were  named  to  choose  them. 
Since  there  was  no  Republican  President  in  office,  the 
Southern  delegates  were  procurable  for  any  candidate 
who  might  be  able  to  reach  them.  In  successive  winters 
Hanna  established  his  home  in  the  South,  where  Governor 
McKinley  was  repeatedly  his  guest,  while  Southern  poli 
ticians  were  exposed  to  his  influence.  Before  the  Republi 
can  Convention  was  assembled  at  St.  Louis  on  June  16, 
1896,  McKinley's  nomination  was  assured;  and  it  was  con 
firmed  by  that  body  upon  its  first  ballot. 

Thomas  B.  Reed  ran  second  to  McKinley  in  the  conven 
tion.  His  supporters,  who  were  more  numerous  than  the 
delegates  voting  for  him  would  indicate,  included  Repub 
licans  who  distrusted  the  methods  of  the  party  organization 
as  well  as  those  who  disliked  the  identification  of  the  party 
with  protection.  The  other  minor  candidates,  Quay,  Whar- 
ton,  and  Allison,  were  favorite  sons  whose  support  would 
probably  not  have  lasted  long  after  the  first  ballot.  Garrett 
A.  Hobart,  of  New  Jersey,  was  selected  as  Vice- President. 

The  nomination  of  McKinley  was  a  foregone  conclusion, 
but  as  the  date  for  the  Republican  Convention  approached, 
popular  interest  weakened  in  the  protective  tariff  McKinley 
and  became  absorbed  in  the  newer  issue  of  free  and  Hobart 
silver.  Upon  this  latter  theme  the  party  had  never  taken  a 
specific  stand.  Its  platforms  had  been  uncertain  or  evasive, 
and  had  been  written  to  make  it  possible  for  the  party  to 
retain  the  support  of  both  free-silver  men  and  their  oppo 
nents.  The  attitude  of  the  Republican  Party  on  the  silver 
question,  now  that  one  could  not  longer  be  avoided,  was 
determined  by  two  sets  of  factors,  the  probable  conduct  of 
the  Democrats  and  the  opinions  of  individual  Republicans. 


218     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

Most  of  the  delegates  to  the  Democratic  Convention  had 

been  selected  before  the  Republicans  met,  with  instructions 

to  support  the  resumption  of  the  free  coinage  of 

Coinage  ..  .  r    .     ^-* 

planks  in  silver  at  the  ratio  of  sixteen  to  one.  It  was  cer- 
pfaSorms  tain  that  Democracy  would  take  this  attitude  in 
spite  of  disapproval  of  President  Cleveland  and 
his  Cabinet.  With  a  Democratic  platform  outspoken  for 
free  silver,  it  would  be  impracticable  for  Republicans  to 
evade  the  issue  any  longer,  while  within  the  Republican 
Party  were  a  large  majority  of  those  voters  to  whom  free 
silver  appeared  to  be  malignant  repudiation  and  dis 
honesty.  The  strength  of  free  silver  was  in  the  South  and 
West,  where  the  converts  to  Populism  were  the  most 
numerous.  In  the  North  and  East,  where  capital  was  more 
abundant,  and  where  its  possessors  were  already  likely  to 
be  Republican,  lay  the  opposition  to  it.  Easterners  laid 
aside  their  discussions  of  the  tariff  for  the  time  being  in 
order  to  meet  the  more  alarming  crisis.  The  opposition  to 
free  silver  insisted  that  the  Republican  Party  take  as  ex 
plicit  an  attitude  as  the  Democrats  were  about  to  take, 
and  upon  the  other  side. 

The  Republican  coinage  plank  began  with  a  generality 
for  sound  money  and  claimed  credit  because  that  party 
procured  "the  enactment  of  a  law  providing  for  the  re 
sumption  of  specie  payments  in  1879;  since  then  every 
dollar  has  been  as  good  as  gold.  We  are  unalterably  op 
posed  to  every  measure  calculated  to  debase  our  currency 
or  impair  the  credit  of  our  country.  We  are,  therefore, 
opposed  to  the  free  coinage  of  silver,  except  by  international 
agreement  .  .  .  and  until  such  agreement  can  be  obtained, 
the  existing  gold  standard  must  be  preserved.  All  our 
silver  and  paper  currency  must  be  maintained  at  parity 
with  gold,  and  we  favor  all  measures  designed  to  maintain 
inviolably  the  obligations  of  the  United  States  and  ajl  our 
money,  whether  coin  or  paper,  at  the  present  standard,  the 
standard  of  the  most  enlightened  nations  of  the  earth." 
The  crisis  that  thus  made  silver  a  party  issue  weakened  the 
availability  of  McKinley  as  a  candidate,  since  he  had  never 


THE  FIRST  McKINLEY  CAMPAIGN,  1896        219 

been  especially  identified  with  the  currency  question  and 
had  incidentally  made  speeches  that  could  be  used  against 
him  by  the  advocates  of  free  silver.  As  the  crisis  loomed  he 
maintained  a  discreet  and  unbroken  silence  until  his  pro 
tectionist  friends  had  procured  his  nomination.  As  a  can 
didate  he  gave  support  to  the  gold  standard. 

The  adoption  of  the  Republican  gold  plank  brought 
about  an  open  breach  in  the  convention.  Thirty-four 
delegates  followed  Senator  Henry  M.  Teller,  of  Colorado, 
in  a  formal  protest  and  left  the  convention  in  a  body. 
In  the  Western  States,  to  which  most  of  the  bolting  dele 
gates  belonged,  it  appeared  that  the  Republican  Party  had 
sold  its  soul  to  selfish  interests.  The  belief  there  was  pro 
found  that  silver  had  been  demonetized  by  a  conspiracy  of 
money-lenders,  and  that  the  restoration  of  free  coinage  was 
necessary  to  undo  a  crime  against  humanity. 

The  Republican  split  over  free  silver  intensified  the 
certainty  that  the  Democratic  Party  would  support  it.  In 
the  organization  of  the  convention  meeting  July  7  in 
Chicago,  the  free-silver  forces  repudiated  the  attempts  of 
the  National  Committee  to  steer  them  away  from  the 
chosen  issue,  and  increased  their  voting  strength  by  un 
seating  a  gold-standard  delegation  from  Nebraska  in  favor 
of  its  free-silver  contestants.  By  a  vote  of  628  to  301,  the 
party  demanded  "the  free  and  unlimited  coinage  of  both 
silver  and  gold  at  the  present  legal  ratio  of  16  to  I  without 
waiting  for  the  aid  or  consent  of  any  other  nation.  We 
demand  that  the  standard  silver  dollar  shall  be  of  full  legal 
tender,  equally  with  gold,  for  all  debts,  public  and  private, 
and  we  favor  such  legislation  as  will  prevent  in  the  future 
the  demonetization  of  any  kind  of  legal-tender  money  by 
private  contract.  .  .  .  We  declare  that  the  act  of  1873  de 
monetizing  silver  without  the  knowledge  or  approval  of  the 
American  people  has  resulted  in  the  appreciation  of  gold 
and  a  corresponding  fall  in  the  prices  of  commodities  pro 
duced  by  the  people;  a  heavy  increase  in  the  burden  of 
taxation  and  of  all  debts,  public  and  private;  the  enrich 
ment  of  the  money-lending  class  at  home  and  abroad;  the 


220     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

prostration  of  industry  and  impoverishment  of  the  people." 
Fifteen  candidates  received  votes  on  the  first  ballot  for 
the  nomination,  while  178  delegates  who  disapproved  the 
William  platform  refused  to  vote  at  all.  Of  the  leading 
J.  Bryan  candidates,  two  possessed  the  prominence  that 
belonged  to  men  who  had  been  Democratic  governors  of 
Republican  States,  Robert  E.  Pattison,  of  Pennsylvania, 
and  Horace  Boies,  of  Iowa.  A  third,  who  was  a  leader  on 
the  first  ballot,  was  Richard  P.  Bland,  of  Missouri,  who  had 
been  sponsor  of  free  silver  for  nearly  twenty  years.  A 
fourth  was  the  leader  of  the  victorious  Nebraska  free-silver 
delegation,  William  J.  Bryan.  In  his  four  years  in  Con 
gress,  1891-95,  Bryan  had  become  known  as  an  effective 
and  persuasive  speaker.  He  had  early  supported  free  silver 
as  a  measure  of  social  reform,  and  after  the  expiration  of 
his  term  in  Congress  he  had  led  in  the  organized  movement 
to  convert  his  party  to  free  silver.  He  had  supported  the 
program  of  the  People's  Party  without  admitting  that  he 
ceased  to  be  a  Democrat.  When  his  delegation  was  finally 
seated  in  the  Chicago  Convention,  it  fell  to  him  to  close  the 
debate  upon  a  plank  offered  by  a  minority  of  the  Committee 
on  Resolutions  that  repudiated  free  silver  and  commended 
"the  honesty,  the  economy,  courage,  and  fidelity  of  the 
present  Democratic  Administration."  This  was  on  the 
third  day  of  the  convention  with  the  delegates  hot  and 
weary,  with  the  old  party  leaders  hopelessly  outvoted,  and 
the  headless  minority  bewildered  by  the  possession  of 
power  without  leadership.  "An  opportunity  to  close  such 
a  debate  had  never  come  to  me  before,"  wrote  Bryan  when 
he  described  the  contest,  "and  I  doubt  if  as  good  an  oppor 
tunity  had  ever  come  to  any  other  person  during  this  gen 
eration."  The  voice  of  the  young  orator,  for  he  was  only 
thirty-six  years  of  age,  penetrated  every  corner  of  the  con 
vention  hall,  while  his  stage  presence  captured  the  attention 
of  the  weary  delegations  and  held  it  throughout  his  repeti 
tion  of  the  substance  of  a  glowing  speech  that  he  had  for 
years  been  making  on  the  stump.  It  was  new  to  the  dele 
gates  and  was  as  new  to  national  politics  as  were  Bryan's 


THE  FIRST  McKINLEY  CAMPAIGN,  1896        221 

name  and  face.  It  ended  with  a  peroration  now  famous  in 
campaign  oratory:  "If  they  dare  to  come  out  in  the  open 
field  and  defend  the  gold  standard  as  a  good  thing,  we  will 
fight  them  to  the  uttermost.  Having  behind  us  the  pro 
ducing  masses  of  this  nation  and  the  world,  supported  by 
the  commercial  interests,  the  laboring  interests,  and  the 
toilers  everywhere,  we  will  answer  their  demand  for  a  gold 
standard  by  saying  to  them :  You  shall  not  press  down  upon 
the  brow  of  labor  this  crown  of  thorns,  you  shall  not  crucify 
mankind  upon  a  cross  of  gold."  On  the  fourth  ballot 
Bryan  took  the  lead;  on  the  fifth  he  was  within  twelve 
votes  of  the  requisite  two  thirds  to  nominate  him ;  and  these 
were  secured  by  transfer  without  another  roll-call.  Arthur 
Sewall,  of  Maine,  was  nominated  as  his  companion  on  the 
ticket. 

The  hopes  of  Populism  to  become  a  new  great  party  were 
destroyed  by  the  action  of  the  major  parties  in  accepting 
the  silver  issue.  On  July  22  two  conventions  po 
met  at  St.  Louis,  one  calling  itself  a  National 
Silver  Party,  and  the  other  the  People's  Party.  There  was 
no  need  for  the  former  body  to  do  anything  but  concur  in  the 
Democratic  stand,  and  to  endorse  its  nominations.  The 
Populists,  however,  were  faced  with  problems  affecting  the 
future  of  the  party.  "If  we  fuse,  we  are  sunk,"  wrote  one 
of  the  Populist  leaders,  who  added,  "If  we  don't  fuse,  all 
the  silver  men  will  leave  us  for  the  more  powerful  Demo 
crats."  For  the  real  leaders  of  the  party,  who  sought  an 
extensive  program  of  reform,  this  was  a  tragedy.  The 
majority  of  the  convention,  drawing  their  inspiration  from 
the  single  measure  of  free  silver,  voted  for  fusion  with  the 
Democrats  and  concurrence  in  their  nomination.  A  middle- 
of-the-road  movement  of  genuine  Populists  opposed  fusion 
of  any  sort  in  the  hope  of  maintaining  party  existence. 
The  platform,  repeating  and  elaborating  that  of  1892,  was 
carried  first.  The  Vice- President  was  nominated  next, 
for  even  the  fusion  Populists  opposed  Sewall,  who  was 
a  wealthy  Maine  shipbuilder.  Thomas  E.  Watson,  of 
Georgia,  was  chosen  for  this  post  after  the  first  ballot,  and 


222     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

subsequently  Bryan  was  nominated  for  the  presidency  over 
four  minor  candidates,  Norton,  Debs,  Donnelly,  and  Coxey. 

The  campaign  of  1896  was  fought  upon  the  clear  issue  of 
the  gold  standard  as  against  free  silver  with  the  forces  of 
The  Gold  class  and  section  arrayed  against  each  other  as 
Democrats  m  no  other  canvass  except  1860.  Party  lines 
were  abandoned.  Even  the  Prohibitionists  split  and 
placed  gold  and  silver  tickets  in  the  field.  The  bolt  of  the 
mining  delegates  from  the  Republican  Party  was  followed 
by  that  of  the  advocates  of  gold  from  the  Democratic 
Party.  On  September  2  there  convened  at  Indianapolis 
a  hastily  assembled  convention  of  Democrats  who  would 
neither  support  a  Republican  candidate  nor  accept  the 
regular  Democratic  ticket.  "The  declarations  of  the 
Chicago  convention,"  it  declared,  "attack  individual  free 
dom,  the  right  of  private  contract,  the  independence  of  the 
judiciary,  and  the  authority  of  the  President  to  enforce 
Federal  laws.  They  advocate  a  reckless  attempt  to  in 
crease  the  price  of  silver  by  legislation,  to  the  debasement 
of  our  monetary  standard,  and  threaten  unlimited  issues 
of  paper  money  by  the  Government.  They  abandon  for 
Republican  allies  the  Democratic  cause  of  tariff  reform,  to 
court  the  favor  of  protectionists  to  their  fiscal  heresy." 
The  Gold  Democratic  Convention  endorsed  the  "Fidelity, 
patriotism,  and  courage"  of  Cleveland,  and  nominated  a 
ticket  consisting  of  John  M.  Palmer,  of  Illinois,  and  Simon 
B.  Buckner,  of  Kentucky.  Cleveland  and  members  of  his 
Cabinet  supported  this  ticket. 

The  fight  of  classes  in  the  campaign  was  intensified  by 
education  and  the  use  of  funds.  The  decision  about  free 
Election  silver  turned  in  the  last  analysis  upon  an  eco- 
of  McKin-  nomic  argument,  the  technicalities  of  which 
were  too  stubborn  to  be  removed  by  ordinary 
platform  oratory.  The  class  appeal  in  favor  of  free  silver 
was  met  by  class  appeal  against  it.  Both  party  organi 
zations  sought  to  secure  the  deciding  votes  from  the  mi 
nority  susceptible  of  being  reached  by  better  arguments. 
Hanna  was  made  chairman  of  the  Republican  National 


THE  FIRST  McKINLEY  CAMPAIGN,  1896        223 

Committee  and  utilized  the  large  funds  made  available  by 
his  old  allies,  the  manufacturers,  and  by  new  allies  in  the 
form  of  banks  and  insurance  companies  who  feared  re 
pudiation.  Campaign  speakers  were  for  the  first  time 
deliberately  trained  to  carry  an  argument  to  the  people  and 
to  gain  a  victory  based  upon  conviction.  Bryan  was  him 
self  the  most  persuasive  speaker  for  his  party  and  spread 
panic  in  Republican  centers,  which  he  invaded  on  his 
speaking  tour.  "  Probably  no  man  in  civil  life  has  succeeded 
in  inspiring  so  much  terror,  without  taking  life,"  said  the 
Nation,  when  the  vote  was  in.  McKinley,  on  the  contrary, 
remained  quietly  at  his  Canton  home,  receiving  visiting 
delegations  from  week  to  week,  while  his  managers  bore  the 
gospel  of  sound  money  to  the  people.  He  was  elected  by 
an  absolute  majority  of  the  vote  cast,  and  with  an  electoral 
vote  of  271  to  176. 

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL  NOTE 

James  Ford  Rhodes,  History  of  the  United  States,  vol.  vm  (1919),  comes 
to  an  end  with  this  election,  and  there  is  no  compendious  history  that  con 
tinues  his  story.  Biographical  materials  on  the  campaign  can  be  found  in 
William  J.  Bryan,  The  First  Battle  (1896) ;  William  V.  Byers,  An  American 
Commoner.  The  Life  and  Times  of  Richard  Parks  Bland  (1900);  Tom  L. 
Johnson,  My  Story  (1913);  Herbert  Croly,  Marcus  Alonzo  Hanna  (1912); 
Charles  S.  Olcott,  Life  of  William  McKinley  (1916);  David  Magie,  Life  of 
Garrett  A.  Hobart  (1910);  WTilliam  Dana  Orcutt,  Burrows  of  Michigan  and 
the  Republican  Party  (1917) ;  and  L.  J.  Lang  (ed.)  Autobiography  of  Thomas 
Collier  Plait  (1910). 


CHAPTER  XXIII 
THE  "G.O.P." 

THE  Republican  Party  that  was  returned  to  power  on 
March  4,  1897,  possessed  a  definiteness  of  purpose  and  a 
Property  closely  knit  organization  that  make  it  stand  out 
and  politics  amOng  national  parties  in  their  periods  of  as 
cendancy.  Its  record  in  the  Civil  War,  still  an  asset  in  any 
campaign,  entitled  its  spokesmen  to  refer  to  it  in  glowing 
terms  as  the  "Grand  Old  Party."  The  initial  letters  of 
the  nickname,  "G.O.P.,"  now  possessed  a  connotation  that 
had  reference  to  the  present  in  addition  to  the  past.  The 
purpose  of  the  party  organization  was  to  advance  the  inter 
ests  of  its  members  and  thereby  the  interests  of  the  nation. 
Under  the  impact  of  two  great  issues  in  a  single  decade, 
one  aspect  of  those  interests  had  been  forged  into  a  keen 
and  weighted  determination.  The  demands  for  tariff  re 
form  and  free  silver  had  driven  into  the  Republican  organi 
zation  nearly  all  citizens  who  were  in  a  position  to  suffer 
from  European  competition  or  domestic  inflation.  The 
holders  of  property  as  a  body  were  Republican,  and  it  is 
impossible  to  disentangle  the  complex  of  motives,  selfish 
and  patriotic,  that  held  them  there.  The  best  judgment 
of  history  and  economics  has  approved  the  fight  for  the 
maintenance  of  the  gold  standard.  It  has  been  less  cer 
tain  upon  the  elemental  merits  of  the  tariff.  But  what 
ever  the  motives  in  individual  cases,  the  result  of  the  long 
fight  over  these  two  issues  was  to  bring  to  power  in  the 
G.O.P.  strong-willed  men  of  financial  power  and  political 
resource  who  felt  themselves  vindicated  and  approved  by 
the  defeat  of  Bryan. 

The  bitterness  of  the  campaign  disappeared  so  rapidly  as 
to  arouse  suspicion  that  it  was  only  stage  play.  Explana 
tions  for  the  subsidence  of  passion  are  to  be  found  in  the 
assurance  that  the  currency  would  not  be  depreciated,  and% 


THE  G.O.P.  225 

in  the  vision  of  prosperity  that  turned  much  of  the  bitter 
ness  of  the  discontented  classes  into  hope.  McKinley  had 
been  advertised  by  his  friends  as  the  "advance  agent  of 
prosperity."  The  prosperity  which  he  heralded  was  visible 
even  before  he  was  elected,  in  bumper  crops  and  rising 
prices  for  them.  Populism  was  never  a  real  party,  but 
was  rather  a  temporary  accumulation  of  the  discontented 
whose  strongest  bond  of  union  disappeared  as  individual 
Populists  became  solvent  members  of  society.  The  general 
recovery  from  the  panic  of  1893  began  to  be  visible  in  the 
summer  of  1896  and  increasingly  thereafter  weakened  the 
forces  of  discontent  and  enabled  Republican  leaders  to 
take  pride  in  their  success  in  dispelling  hard  times. 

The  cycle  of  falling  prices  that  began  in  1865  reached  the 
dip  of  its  curve  about  1895  and  started  to  ascend  once  more. 
In  so  far  as  the  low  prices  were  due  to  the  scar-  prosperity 
city  of  money  and  its  appreciation  in  value,  there  an.d  rising 
was  a  tendency  to  correct  this  in  the  train  of 
events  which  began  in  the  summer  of  1896  when  a  group  of 
prospectors  found  placer  gold  along  the  tributaries  of  the 
Yukon  River  near  the  boundary  that  separates  Canada 
from  Alaska.  The  Klondike  gold  fields  became  known  to 
the  world  in  time  for  a  rush  of  miners  to  hurry  there  in 
1897.  Out  of  the  Klondike  in  the  next  two  decades  came 
a  flood  of  gold  that  was  reenforced  by  other  streams  from 
South  Africa,  Australia,  the  United  States,  and  elsewhere. 
The  annual  gold  production  of  the  world  averaged  $132,- 
000,000  for  the  fifteen  years  before  1896  and  rose  to 
$337,ooo,ooo  for  the  fifteen  years  that  followed.  The  in 
crease  in  gold  lowered  its  value  and  operated  both  to  in 
crease  the  amount  of  money  in  existence  and  to  depreciate 
the  dollar.  Prices  started  upward  about  1896,  and  as  they 
rose,  bringing  visible  inflation  with  them,  they  further  weak 
ened  the  power  of  the  party  movement  for  cheap  money. 

The  Cabinet  of  William  McKinley  was  built  around  the 
ideas  of  party  regularity  and  financial  solidity.    McKinley 's 
McKinley  himself  had  been  an  unwelcome  candi-    Cabmet 
date  in  the  eyes  of  many  supporters  of  the  gold  standard 


226    RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

because  of  his  late  conversion  to  that  doctrine.  Hobart, 
his  Vice-President,  was  too  sound  on  this  to  admit  of  any 
doubt.  The  earliest  offer  of  a  Cabinet  post  was  tendered 
to  Marcus  A.  Hanna,  whom  McKinley's  biographer  de 
scribes  as  a  magnificent  "political  general  —  square,  effi 
cient,  and  resourceful."  The  invitation  was  rejected,  for 
Hanna  preferred  a  freer  position  for  himself.  Thus  far  he 
had  been  content  to  exert  political  influence  from  outside 
the  lines  of  office.  He  now  desired  to  become  Senator  from 
Ohio,  and  when  John  Sherman  was  made  Secretary  of 
State,  that  desire  became  practicable.  Hanna  was  ap 
pointed  to  the  Senate  by  Governor  Bushnell,  of  Ohio,  in 
the  vacancy  created  by  Sherman's  resignation.  Sherman 
as  Secretary  of  State  gave  to  the  new  Administration  the 
prestige  of  one  who  had  been  the  wisest  financial  statesman 
in  the  party. 

The  career  of  John  Sherman  was  nearly  at  an  end  when 
he  entered  upon  this  final  chapter.  For  a  long  generation 
he  had  been  a  figure  in  national  affairs,  and  for  two  decades 
a  reasonable  aspirant  for  the  presidency.  Under  his  hand 
the  resumption  bill  had  been  framed  and  resumption  itself 
administered.  There  were  rumors  now  that  his  health  was 
gone  and  that  mental  decay  had  set  in.  These  rumors 
were  so  strong  that  McKinley  felt  forced  to  deny  their  truth 
as  late  as  February,  1897.  He  persisted,  nevertheless,  in 
appointing  Sherman,  whose  actual  mental  condition  soon 
confirmed  the  rumors.  William  R.  Day,  of  Canton,  an  old 
personal  friend  of  the  President,  was  made  Assistant  Secre 
tary  of  State  to  carry  the  bulk  of  Sherman's  burdens  and 
later  to  succeed  him. 

The  connecting  link  between  the  new  Republican  Party 
and  the  old  was  John  Hay,  who  began  life  as  Lincoln's 
private  secretary  and  who  now  was  sent  as  Ambassador  to 
London,  where  he  relieved  Thomas  F.  Bayard,  of  Dela 
ware.  Due  to  the  efforts  of  Hay,  more  than  to  those  of  any 
other  individual,  the  party  and  the  nation  possessed  the 
great  heritage  of  Abraham  Lincoln.  The  first  Republican 
President  had  died  in  1865,  with  the  terms  of  peace  unset- 


THE  G.O.P.  227 

tied  and  with  his  own  party  in  revolt  against  him.  The 
monumental  biography  that  Nicolay  and  Hay  produced, 
and  that  ran  serially  in  the  Century  through  four  years  in 
the  middle  eighties,  revealed  the  character  and  idealism  of 
Lincoln  and  brought  him  into  the  little  inner  group  of  great 
Americans.  Hay,  whose  acquaintance  in  America  and 
abroad  had  few  equals,  had  been  in  England  shortly  before 
his  appointment  as  Ambassador,  and  had  there  taken  oc 
casion  to  give  friendly,  informal  advice  to  the  British  Gov 
ernment  to  adjust  its  differences  with  Cleveland  over  Ven 
ezuela  and  not  to  expect  that  McKinley  would  weaken 
from  the  position  of  his  predecessor. 

For  Secretary  of  the  Treasury  McKinley  chose  Lyman  P. 
Gage,  of  Chicago,  a  prominent  banker  who  had  led  in  the 
lo"ng"agitation  to  defend  the  gold  standard  in  the  Middle 
West.  It  was  impossible  to  hope  for  Congressional  action 
in  support  of  the  gold  standard  at  once.  The  Fifty-Fifth 
Congress,  elected  with  McKinley,  was  a  Republican  body 
in  both  houses,  but  in  the  Senate  that  majority  was  avail 
able  only  on  measures  not  connected  with  the  currency,  for 
a  group  of  silver  Republican  Senators  held  the  balance  of 
power.  The  appointment  of  Gage  was  accepted  as  a  guar 
antee  of  the  determination  of  the  Administration  to  sup 
port  the  gold  standard.  During  1898  a  monetary  confer 
ence  was  held  at  Indianapolis,  where  was  begun  a  serious 
and  protracted  national  study  in  the  elements  of  a  sound 
currency. 

The  rest  of  the  Cabinet  was  composed  of  self-made  and 
substantial  men,  chosen  largely  because  of  their  importance 
to  the  party.  By  the  accident  of  events  public  attention 
was  later  turned  to  Russell  A.  Alger,  of  Michigan,  who  be 
came  Secretary  of  War.  Alger  had  emerged  from  the  Civil 
War  at  the  age  of  twenty-nine  with  the  rank  of  major-gen 
eral  of  volunteers.  He  had  then  become  a  manufacturer 
and  had  engaged  in  the  profitable  work  of  exploiting  timber 
resources  of  northern  Michigan.  By  1888  he  had  been 
governor  of  Michigan  and  had  become  a  prominent  favorite 
son  in  the  Republican  Convention  of  that  year.  He  was 


228     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

identified  with  big  business,  the  protected  industries  and 
the  trusts,  and  was  a  reasonable  appointee  in  the  Repub 
lican  Party  as  it  was  organized  in  1897. 

y  With  the  Senate  majority  still  favoring  free  silver,  it 
was  impracticable  to  carry  out  at  once  the  currency  mandate 
of  1896,  but  the  submerged  purpose  of  the  party  to  revise 
the  Wilson  Bill  came  to  the  surface  immediately  after  elec 
tion.  A  few  gold-standard  tariff  reformers  protested  bit 
terly  that  it  was  a  betrayal  of  confidence  to  use  the  Re 
publican  majority  for  tariff  purposes,  but  the  official  spokes 
men  of  the  party  declared  that  the  mandate  of  the  election 
was  for  the  tariff  as  well  as  gold.  Before  Cleveland  left 
office,  it  was  officially  announced  that  among  McKinley's 
earliest  acts  would  be  a  call  for  a  special  session  to  revise 
the  tariff.  Congress  assembled  in  accordance  with  this  in 
tent  on  March  15,  1897,  and  Reed,  who  was  reflected  as 
Speaker,  refused  to  appoint  any  committees  of  the  House 
except  those  connected  with  the  legislative  program. 

Nelson  R.  Dingley,  of  Maine,  introduced  the  new  tariff 
bill  that  passed  the  House  after  two  weeks'  perfunctory 
J  The  Ding-  debate.  The  draft  had  been  framed  and  par 
ley  tariff  tially  debated  during  the  preceding  session  of» 
Congress,  and  the  preliminary  touches  had  been  given  it  in 
the  recess  between  March  4  and  March  15.  Its  passage^ 
was  aided  by  the  fact  that  there  was  still  a  deficit  in  the 
National  Treasury.  In  1894  the  United  States  ran  behind 
$69,000,000,  and  drew  upon  the  surplus  to  that  extent.  The 
deficit  of  1895  was  $42,000,000;  1896,  $25,000,000,  and 
1897,  $18,000,000.  The  need  for  extra  revenue  was  such 
as  to  strengthen  every  appeal  for  higher  rates. 
j  In  the  rewriting  of  the  Dingley  Bill  that  took  place  while 
it  was  pending  in  the  Senate,  the  representatives  of  manu 
facturing  interests  possessed  the  greatest  influence.  The 
general  character  of  the  measure  had  been  determined  upon 
in  advance.  Only  the  amount  of  protection  to  be  extended 
remained  in  doubt,  and  this  was  settled  upon  the  represen 
tations  of  the  industries  affected.  The  chief  of  the  Bureau 
of  Statistics,  Worth ington  C.  Ford,  asserted  during  the  de- 


THE  G.O.P.  229 

bates  that  the  protective  rates  were  being  made  so  high  as 
to  be  prohibitory,  with  the  result  that  the  bill  would  pro 
duce  insufficient  revenue  for  the  Government.  He  ob 
served  that  the  whole  fiscal  policy  was  changing  from  one 
of  revenue  with  incidental  protection  to  that  of  protection 
with  incidental  revenue.  The  bill  became  a  law  in  July, 
1897,  as  the  most  thorough-going  protective  measure  in 
American  history.  It  was  passed,  complained  Laughlin 
and  Willis,  "with  a  striking  disregard  of  all  legislative  pro 
prieties  and  bolstered  up  by  the  feeling  of  security  based 
on  a  knowledge  that  the  conservative  classes  of  the  country 
had  received  a  terrible  fright." 

The  Dingley  tariff  was  the  fruit  of  the  complete  identi 
fication  of  the  Republican  Party  with  the  interests  of  busi- 
ness.  For  nearly  fifteen  years  the  organization  of  the  party 
remained  firm  enough  to  withstand  all  attacks  directed 
against  it  from  without.  The  country  continued  prosperous 
and  the  party  of  prosperity  held  its  power.  The  Demo 
cratic  opposition  remained  weak  and  disorganized  as  Cleve 
land  had  left  it.  The  absence  of  an  effective  opposition  is 
responsible  for  many  of  the  political  phenomena  between 
1897  and  1911. 

Due  to  the  double  split  produced  by  Cleveland  and 
Bryan,  permanent  animosities  were  sown  among  the  leaders 
of  the  party,  and  the  disconnected  factions  lost  their  power 
to  hold  the  Republican  majority  to  a  definite  course.  The 
effective  influences  tending  to  divert  the  Republican  Party 
to  a  new  program  came  from  within  and  were  increased  by 
the  feeling  of  security  created  by  the  Democratic  collapse. 

The  People's  Party,  with  its  broad  program  of  reformA 
inspired  interest  far  beyond  its  capacity  to  gain  votes.     Nei-  ( 
ther  of  the  larger  parties  was  receptive  to  new  ideas  or  wel 
comed  their  exponents.     Neither  party,  whether  it  talked 
of  tariff  or  of  currency,  had  a  program  that  frankly  faced 
the  changes  brought  into  society  by  the  recent  revolution 
in  communication  and  manufacture.     The  old  doctrine  of 
individual  freedom  had  made  it  possible  for  a  few  individ 
uals  to  exploit  the  natural  resources  of  the  country  and  to 


230     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

appropriate  a  disproportionate  share  of  the  freedom  for 
themselves.  Neither  of  the  parties  and  few  of  the  older  poli 
ticians  had  any  vision  of  the  changes  that  must  be  made  to 
restore  a  reasonable  degree  of  opportunity  to  the  tenant 
farmer  and  the  tenement  workman.  In  the  great  cities, 
boss  rule  was  still  defiant,  and  much  of  the  organic  strength 
of  both  parties  depended  upon  corrupt  manipulation  of 
votes  and  selfish  use  of  the  power  derived  from  this  manipu 
lation.  Quay,  Platt,  and  Hanna  had  succeeded  to  the 
leadership  formerly  exercised  by  Conkling,  Cameron,  and 
Elaine,  but  brought  little  change  for  the  better  in  their 
understanding  of  the  duties  of  the  modern  state. 

In  the  People's  Party  the  protest  against  this  indifference 
of  the  party  organizations  became  a  matter  of  religion. 
Republican  Both  parties,  in  its  belief,  were  corrupt  and  un- 
counter-  responsive.  Measures  that  were  designed  to 

reformation      .       '    ,          ..  .   .          /-IT 

broaden  the  opportunities  of  life  or  to  break  the 
power  of  the  bosses  were  accepted  without  criticism  or  ex 
amination  and  incorporated  in  the  miscellaneous  catalogue 
of  reforms  that  constituted  the  Populist  platform.  The 
interest  in  these  reforms  was  widely  spread  among  citizens 
of  no  political  activity  and  gained  earnest  converts  among 
young  Republican  politicians  who  found  their  aspirations 
checked  by  the  compact  machinery  of  the  G.O.P.  The 
j  stress  of  the  currency  campaign  kept  party  regularity  well 
to  the  fore  until  1896,  but  thereafter  signs  are  visible  of  a 
counter-reformation  within  the  Republican  Party  working 
to  detach  it  from  its  close  alliance  with  business  and  to 
make  it  more  truly  a  party  of  the  people. 

The  attack  of  the  Populists  upon  the  mechanics  of  the 
great  parties  resolved  itself  into  the  demand  for  specific 
The  "in-         reforms  including  the  direct  election  of  Senators 
terests"  in      and  an  increase  in  direct  control  over  govern 
ment  by  the  people.      The  initiative  and  the 
y  referendum  seemed  adapted  to  correct  the  abuses  due  to 
improper  control  of  the  legislatures  of  the  States.     The  con 
trol  of  State  legislation  was  an  avowed  policy  of  the  rail- 
roads-and  the  larger  corporations,     Most  commonly  it  took 


THE  G.O.P.  231 

the  form  of  dissuading  the  legislatures  from  passing  antag 
onistic  laws.  The  railroad  managers  who  employed  their 
lobbyists  declared  that  this  was  necessary  to  prevent 
blackmail,  and  asserted  that  unscrupulous  legislators  intro 
duced  hostile  legislation  for  the  sole  purpose  of  having  it 
bought  off.  In  spite  of  the  fact  that  railroad  commissions 
had  been  numerous  for  more  than  twenty  years,  little  had 
been  done  to  equalize  rates  or  to  impose  a  fair  burden  of 
taxation  upon  railroad  property.  The  distrust  of  legis 
latures  revealed  itself  in  long  and  minute  State  constitu 
tions.  If  the  people  could  act  directly,  it  was  hoped  that 
some  of  the  abuses  might  be  avoided.  The  advocates  of 
initiative  and  referendum  had  this  end  in  view. 

The  direct  jprimary  was  urged,  as  early  as  1897,  as  an 
additional  means  of  safeguarding  the  Government  against 
bosses  and  corrupt  interests.  In  that  year  Direct 
Robert  M.  La  Follette  advanced  a  general  pro-  Primaries 
gram  for  direct  nominations  for  office,  including  even  the 
presidency.  La  Follette  had  already  served  three  terms  in 
Congress  where  his  ready  mastery  of  figures  made  him  one 
of  the  most  serviceable  of  Republican  members  on  the  Com 
mittee  on  Ways  and  Means.  Defeated  for  reelection  in 
1890,  he  suffered  with  the  Republican  Government  of  Wis 
consin  because  of  the  attempt  of  that  Government  to  com 
pel  a  wider  use  of  the  English  language  in  the  schools.  He 
soon  came  back  into  politics  and  was  beaten  for  the  nomina 
tion  as  governor  in  1896  by  what  he  regarded  as  a  corrupt 
manipulation  of  delegates  against  him.  His  reform  of  the 
convention  system  was  based  upon  his  own  experience  with 
it.  And  as  he  renewed  his  efforts  for  the  nomination  in 
1898  and  1900,  keeping  up  continuously  a  hot  fire  upon  the 
nomination  system,  he  attracted  to  his  reform  other  leaders 
who  like  him  were  disappointed  because  of  their  inability 
to  beat  the  machine. 

The  leaders  of  jgform-were  Republican  after  1896,  as  they  ^ 
had  generally  been  Democratic  or  Populist  in  the  years 
immediately  preceding.     With  little  encouragement  from 
the  G.O.P.,  they  were  heartened  by  an  increasing  interest 


232     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

among  the  people  at  large.  By  1900,  in  which  year  La 
Submer-  Follette  succeeded  in  securing  both  nomination 
gence  of  and  election  as  governor  of  his  State,  the  leaders 
of  the  counter-reformation  began  to  make  an 
impression  upon  the  party  by  their  local  successes.  They 
/worked  under  the  handicap  of  national  prosperity,  and 
struggled  for  the  attention  of  a  people  who  had  forgotten 
the  pangs  of  the  panic  of  1893  and  had  been  distracted 
from  affairs  domestic  by  the  glitter  of  unexpected  and  suc 
cessful  foreign  war. 

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL  NOTE 

John  Sherman,  Recollections  of  Forty  Years  (1895),  was  published  before 
his  collapse  in  McKinley's  Cabinet.  His  official  biography  is  Winfield  S. 
Kerr,  John  Sherman,  His  Life  and  Public  Services  (1908) ;  briefer  and  better 
is  Theodore  E.  Burton,  John  Sherman  (1906).  William  Roscoe  Thayer, 
Life  and  Letters  of  John  Hay  (1915),  is  a  notable  contribution.  Robert  M. 
La  Follette,  Autobiography  (1913),  may  be  profitably  read  in  connection 
with  Isaac  Stephenson,  Recollections  of  a  Long  Life,  1820-1915  (privately 
printed,  1915).  Other  useful  books  are  J.  L.  Laughlin  and  H.  P.  Willis, 
Reciprocity  (1903) ;  G.  H.  Haynes,  The  Election  of  Senators  (1906) ;  Ellis  P. 
Oberholtzer,  Initiative,  Referendum,  and  Recall  in  America  (1911);  John 
Moody,  The  Truth  about  the  Trusts  (1904) ;  and  W.  Z.  Ripley,  Trusts,  Pools, 
and  Corporations  (1905). 


CHAPTER  XXIV 

THE  WAR  WITH  SPAIN 

THE  venerable  John  Sherman,  of  Ohio,  chief  of  McKinley's 
Cabinet,  had  beerTselected  as  Secretary  of  State  because 
his  years  of  experience  as  a  financial  statesman  had  qualified  "^ 
him  to  undertake  the  difficult  negotiation  of  an  agreement 
for   international    bimetallism,    to  which    the    Republican 
Party  had  pledged  itself  in  1896.     A  secondary^reason  for  v 
his  appointment  lay  in  the  fact  that  Marcus  Alonzo  Hanna, 
of  Cleveland,  chairman  of  the  Republican  National  Com 
mittee,  and  astute  guardian  of  McKinley's  aspirations,  de 
sired  to  enter  the  Senate.     It  was  not  certain  in  advance 
that  Governor  Horace  Bushnell,  of  Ohio,  would  consent  to 
gratify  this  aspiration,  for  the  rifts  among  Ohio  politicians ' 
ran  deep  into  their  political  organizations,  but  the  matter 
worked  out  as  desired,  and  Hanna  assumed  the  senatorship 
as  Sherman  undertook  the  tasks  of  foreign  secretary. 

Among  the  minor  pledges  of  the  Republican  Party  in 
1896  was  a  plank  pledging  action  toward  the  ending  of  a  . 
painful  revolution  then  in  progress  on  the  Island    Cuban  pati- 
of  Cuba.     But  few  imagined  that  this  revolu-    ficatlon 
ticn  contained  the  germs  of  war,  nor  could  Sherman  have 
been  named  as  foreign  secretary  with  Cuba  as  a  major 
subject  for  prospective  diplomacy.     On  the  theme  of  Cuba, 
Sherman  as  a  Senator  had  often  expressed  himself  in  lan 
guage  unmeasured  and  severe,  upon  evidence  no  weightier 
than  that  contained  in  the  headlines  of  the  daily  yellow  press. 

Coincident  with  the  Cuban  revolt  a  new  journalism  had  S 
developed  on  both  sides  of  the  Atlantic.  Alfred  Charles 
Harmsworth  had  taken  over  the  Daily  Mail  in  London, 
and  William  Randolph  Hearst  had  acquired  control  of  the 
New  York  Journal.  With  similar  tactics  both  of  these 
editors  had  developed  a  journalism  of  sentimentality  and 
exaggeration,  and  the  latter  had  seized  upon  the  events  of 


234     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

/the  Cuban  insurrection  with  a  purpose  to  manufacture  from 
them  a  war  with  Spain. 

/  It  was  in  February u  1.895,  that  Insurgents  in  the  eastern 
end  of  Cuba  revived  the  guerrilla  warfare  that  had  been 
Insurrec-  suspended  for  seventeen  years,  since  the  close  of 
tionofi895  the  ten  years'  war  Spanish  administration  in 

Cuba  had  not  improved  in  the  intervening  years.  Havana, 
as  the  center  of  culture  and  capital  of  the  island,  had  lorded 
it  over  the  backwoods  regions  of  the  eastern  provinces. 
Madrid  had  failed  to  take  seriously  the  problem  of  colonial 
responsibility  at  a  time  when  the  rest  of  western  Europe 
was  awakening  not  only  to  a  national  appreciation  of  the 
value  of  colonies,  but  also  to  an  acceptance  of  a  duty  in 
advance  of  exploitation. 

The  insurgents  of  1895,  badly  armed  and  poorly  organ 
ized,  were  unable  to  maintain  in  Cuba  anything  resembling 
a  de  facto  government.  Early  in  the  outbreak  their  leader, 
Gomez,  inaugurated  a  policy  of  devastation  and  directed 
the  destruction  of  the  sugar-cane  and  mills  of  the  Span 
ish  loyalists.  Upon  this  pretext  a  strong-armed  military 
governor,  General  Valeriano  Weyler,  was  sent  out  from 
Spain  to  conquer  peace.  At  Weyler 's  command  the  re 
bellious  population,  and  even  the  suspected  population  of 
the  infected  districts,  were  swept  away  from  their  homes 
and  concentrated  in  observation  camps.  Here  in  barbed- 
wire  enclosures  they  were  allowed  to  sicken,  starve,  and  die 
uncared  for.  Across  the  whole  width  of  the  island  toward 
its  eastern  end,  he  cleared  a  broad  band  from  its  jungle 
entanglements  and  built  a  wire  fence  or  teodm  which  he 
patrolled  constantly  in  the  hope  of  confining  the  marauding 
patriot  bands  within  their  provinces  north  of  Santiago.  The 
^horrors  incidental  to  this  campaign  of  suppression  were 
seized  upon  and  exploited  by  the  press.  The  excesses  of 
the  Cuban  patriots  were  extenuated  or  ignored,  while  those 
of  the  Spanish  army  were  displayed  as  evidence  of  inherent 
corruption,  deception,  and  incapacity. 

The  revolutionary  government  had  no  real  existence  on 
the  island,  but  a  handful  of  its  leaders,  safely  living  in  New 


THE  WAR  WITH  SPAIN  235 

York,  formed  a  Cuban  junta  that  pretended  to  be  a  gov 
ernment  and  borrowed  money  where  it  could.    Spain  and 
It  bought  arms  and  ammunition  in  the  United    the  insur- 

.  ,     ,  ,  ,       t  r     rection 

States,  as  it  was  entitled  to  do  under  the  law  of 
nations,  and  ran  them  into  Cuban  ports  by  stealth.  The 
Spanish  Government  denied  the  existence  of  an  actual  war,,  S 
maintained  that  she  was  dealing  with  only  an  aggravated' 
riot;  and  hence  was  unable  to  suppress  this  munitions  trade 
by  the  exercise  of  the  belligerent  rights  of  blockade,  contra-} 
band,  and  search.  As  a  consequence  her  naval  vessels, 
whatever  their  suspicions,  could  make  no  interference  with 
the  traffic  outside  of  the  Cuban  three-mile  limit.  The  re 
membrance  of  the  Virginius  correspondence  of  1873  sug 
gested  the  unwisdom  of  attacks  on  vessels  flying  the  Ameri 
can  flag.  It  was,  however,  entirely  impossible  to  control 
the  whole  Cuban  coast,  and  numerous  cargoes  of  weapons  * 
reached  their  destination.  The  Spanish  Government,  suffer-  ^ 
ing  from  the  traffic  which  it  was  too  feeble  to  prevent,  took 
the  attitude  that  it  was  the  business  of  the  United  States 
to  stop  it.  Cleveland  and  Olney  consistently  repelled  this 
claim,  while  at  the  same  time  warning  American  sympathiz 
ers  not  to  go  beyond  their  lawful  rights,  and  not  to  start 
within  the  limits  of  the  United  States  those  military  ex 
peditions  against  a  friendly  power  that  international  law 
forbids. 

Within  the  United  States  public  sympathy  with  Cuba 
permeated  all  parties,  and  repeated  attempts  were  made  in  S 
Congress  to  force  upon  the  President  a  recognition  of  Cuban 
belligerency.  To  this  suggested  interference  in  the  affairs 
of  Spain,  Cleveland  interposed  as  stubborn  a  denial  as  he 
did  to  the  Spanish  demand  that  the  United  States  police  the 
Cuban  waters  for  her  benefit. 

President  McKinley  took  over  an  exasperating  problem, 
but  one  of  second  magnitude.     The  tasks  of  organizing  a 
Cabinet  and    seeing  the   Dingley  Bill   through    Woodford 
Congress  delayed  the  day  when  the  Adminis-    and 
tration  could  give  serious  attention  to  the  pacifi 
cation  of  Cuba.     In  September  General  Stewart  L.  Wood- 


236     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

ford  arrived  in  Madrid  to  succeed  Hannis  Taylor  as  Minis 
ter  to  Spain,  and  let  it  be  known  among  his  diplomatic 
colleagues  there  "that  before  Congress  should  meet  in  De 
cember,  some  means  must  be  found  whereby  this  struggle 
may  be  put  in  the  sure  way  of  being  peacefully  and  finally 
ended."  The  friendly  offices  for  mediation  which  he  offered 
were  repelled  by  the  Spanish  Government  with  the  comment 
that  it  was  the  duty  of  the  United  States  to  stop  the  trade  in 
arms;  and  the  declaration  that  if  this  were  done,  peace 
would  follow  of  itself.  The  Conservative  Government  which 
Woodford  found  in  power  in  Madrid  was  overturned  in 
October  and  was  replaced  by  the  Ministry  of  Sagasta.  A 
little  later  in  the  autumn,  Weyler  was  recalled  from  Cuba 
and  a  more  moderate  governor  was  sent  out  in  his  place. 

^On  November  25,  1897,  the  Queen-Regent  extended  the 
Spanish  Constitution  to  Cuba,  and  established  a  system 
of  autonomy  therein.  But  it  seemed  clear  to  General 
Woodford  that  no  Spaniard  knew  what  the  word  "auton 
omy"  implied,  and  on  the  island  it  was  acceptable  to 
neither  faction.  The  insurgents  in  Cuba  hooted  the  idea 

*o£  less  than  independence,  and  were  distressed  that  the 
friendly  United  States  should  have  seemed  to  ask  it.  The 
Spanish  loyalists  resented  the  concession,  and  were  angry 
at  the  United  States  for  seeming  to  have  forced  it. 

In  the  winter  of  1897-98,  the  first  steps  were  taken  to 
establish  autonomy  in  practice,  with  such  disturbing  con 
sequences  that  General  Fitzhugh  Lee,  the  American  con 
sul-general  in  Havana,  expressed  a  desire  for  the  moral 
security  that  would  come  from  the  presence  of  an  American 
warship  in  the  harbor.  Toward  the  middle  of  January 
mobs  in  Havana,  noting  against  autonomy,  were  uncertain 

^whether  their  defiance  should  be  directed  against  the  Span 
ish  Government  or  the  American  consul-general,  and  on 

yFebruary  15  the  United  States  cruiser  Maine,  that  had  been 
detached  from  the  Atlantic  squadron  and  sent  to  Cuba  at 
Lee's  request,  was  destroyed  at  her  anchorage  in  Havana 
Harbor  by  an  explosion,  the  responsibility  for  which  has  not 
been  fixed. 


THE  WAR  WITH  SPAIN  237 

The  destruction  of  the   Maine  shocked  the  American 
conscience  already  disturbed  over  the  sufferings    Destruction 
of  Cuba,  and  many  respectable  leaders,  in  addi-    of  the 
tion  to  the  yellow  press,  shouted  the  cry,  ''Re 
member  the  Maine"  and  demanded  a  war  of  vengeance. 

Only  a  few  days  before  the  catastrophe,  which  seemed 
to  reveal  deep  treachery  of  Spanish  character,  occurred  a 
slighter  event  discreditable  to  Spanish  manners.  Dupuy 
de  Lome,  Spanish  Minister  in  Washington,  impressed  by 
the  rising  tide  of  American  sentiment,  and  fearful  that 
neither  Sherman  nor  McKinley  could  withstand  it  or  de 
sired  to,  had  written  a  private  letter  to  a  Cuban  friend  in 
which  he  characterized  the  President  as  a  supine  and  spine 
less  politician,  and  had  suggested  the  desirability  of  ap 
parent  but  unreal  compliance  by  Spain  with  the  American 
demands.  The  publication  in  facsimile  of  this  letter  filched  ^ 
from  the  Havana  post-office  by  an  insurgent  spy,  and  ac 
quired  by  an  American  reporter,  ended  the  usefulness  of  de 
Lome  in  Washington.  It  also  discredited,  in  advance  of  the 
destruction  of  the  Maine,  anything  that  Spain  might  say  or 
do  respecting  the  Maine  accident  or  Cuba. 

The  diplomatic  course  of  Spain  after  the  explosion  was 
to  urge  investigation  and  arbitration  in  order  to  fix  responsi 
bility.  This  was  declined,  and  in  the  ensuing  weeks  naval 
boards  of  inquiry  sat  separately  for  Spain  and  the  United 
States,  and  reached  contradictory  conclusions.  The  Spanish 
board,  examining  in  detail  only  the  surrounding  floor  of  the 
harbor,  for  the  doctrine  of  exterritoriality  kept  them  outside 
the  warship's  hull,  reported  that  the  Maine  was  destroyed 
by  an  internal  explosion.  The  American  board,  diving  into 
the  mangled  hull  of  the  Maine,  but  not  allowed  to  trespass 
on  Spanish  territory  in  exploration  of  the  harbor,  ascribed 
the  destruction  to  an  external  mine.  Before  either  of  the 
inconclusive  reports  was  ready  for  publication,  events  had 
drifted  on.  The  Spanish  Government  had  shown  an  inabil 
ity  to  act  rapidly  enough  in  Cuba  to  satisfy  the  enraged 
American  opinion,  while  in  the  United  States  an  uprising  in 
his  own  party,  brought  bluntly  to  his  attention  by  Vice- 


238     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

President  Hobart,  convinced  McKinley  of  the  impossibility 
of  avoiding  intervention.  Woodford  thought  until  the  last 
that  if  it  had  not  been  for  Congress,  everything  that  Cuba 
gained  could  have  been  brought  about  by  gradual  Spanish 
yielding  ''without  firing  a  shot  or  losing  a  single  life."  On 
April  II  President  McKinley  transmitted  to  Congress  the 
whole  problem  in  the  certainty  that  only  war  could  be  its 
outcome. 

The  navy  of  the  United  States  was  fully  mobilized  for  war 
four  days  after  the  message  went  to  Congress.  It  was  a  new 
Naval  mo-  navy  untested  by  combat,  though  officered  in 
bihzation  part  by  veterans  of  the  Civil  War,  and  adminis 
tered  by  Secretary  John  D.  Long,  of  Massachusetts,  with 
the  enthusiastic  cooperation  of  Theodore  Roosevelt  as  As 
sistant  Secretary.  The  birth  of  the  new  navy  had  been  of 
interest  in  America  for  more  than  fifteen  years.  First  au 
thorized  in  1882  when  the  warships  of  the  Civil  War  were 
rotting  in  their  honorable  old  age,  its  first  battleship,  the 
Indiana,  went  to  sea  in  1895.  A  handful  of  the  new  units 
had  been  sent  to  Kiel  in  that  year  to  assist  in  the  ceremonies 
at  the  opening  of  the  new  German  canal  from  the  Baltic. 
Already  Europe  had  acclaimed  the  fact  that  an  American 
naval  captain,  Alfred  Thayer  Mahan,  had  revolutionized 
the  theory  of  naval  warfare  by  his  epoch-making  volume 
on  the  influence  of  sea-power  on  history.  Between  the 
Atlanta  and  the  Indiana,  the  armored  cruisers  and  battle 
ships  New  York,  Brooklyn,  Texas,  Maine,  with  some  pro 
tected  cruisers  had  gone  into  commission.  Following  the 
Indiana,  the  Massachusetts,  Oregon,  and  Iowa  had  slightly 
increased  the  number  of  modern  battleships.  These  with 
the  minor  vessels  had  been  mobilized  by  the  Navy  Depart 
ment  early  in  1898,  at  about  the  time  when  the  dispatch 
of  the  Maine  to  Havana  indicated  the  wisdom  of  prepa 
ration  for  any  eventuality.  The  vessels  in  the  Atlantic 
were  brought  together  near  the  capes  of  the  Chesapeake, 
and  on  March  27  Captain  W.  T.  Sampson  was  given 
command  of  the  whole  North  Atlantic  squadron.  In  the 
Pacific  there  were  only  vessels  of  the  more  obsolete  classesi 


THE  WAR  WITH  SPAIN  239 

with  the  exception  of  the  Oregon  which  found  herself  isolated 
on  the  North  Pacific  coast.  The  Oregon  was  brought  to 
San  Francisco  Bay,  docked  and  scraped  at  Mare  Island, 
and  hurried  off  on  her  lonely  voyage  to  the  Atlantic.  No 
other  fact  had  ever  stimulated  so  keenly  American  zest  for 
a  canal  at  Panama. 

The  vessels  on  the  Asiatic  station  had  recently  received  a 
new  commander,  through  a  fortunate  selection  which  was 
due  less  to  merit  than  to  politics.  Assistant  Secretary 
Roosevelt  was  responsible  for  the  detail  of  George  Dewey 
to  this  post,  but  it  was  only  through  the  political  pressure 
of  Senator  Redfield  Proctor  that  he  became  aware  of  the 
existence  and  merits  of  this  officer.  In  the  navy  as  in  the 
army  dry  rot  had  been  the  consequence  of  the  ageing  of 
Civil  War  veterans  and  the  indifference  of  the  public  and 
Congress.  There  had  been  an  abrupt  departure  from  naval 
precedent  when  Roosevelt  insisted  upon  diligence  in  gun- 
pointing  and  target  practice.  In  advance  of  the  message  of 
April  1 1 ,  he  had  taken  the  responsibility  of  ordering  Dewey  ' 
to  proceed  to  Hongkong,  there  to  clean  ship  and  outfit,  and  • 
thence  in  the  event  of  war  to  proceed  to  Manila  and  destroy 
the  Spanish  Asiatic  fleet.  In  the  selection  of  George  Dewey 
he  lighted  upon  a  commander  with  a  mind  as  aggressive  as 
his  own. 

The  President's  message  of  April  1 1,  1898,  was  commonly 
regarded  as  a  war  message,  and  in  Congress  the  only  serious 
debate  had  to  do  with  the  form  that  the  action  The  Span- 
should  take  and  the  immediate  effect  of  it  upon  lsh  War 
the  lives  and  safety  of  Americans  in  Cuba.  For  some 
days  action  was  delayed  to  permit  General  Lee  to  commu 
nicate  with  Americans  on  the  island  in  order  to  bring  them 
within  reach  of  safety.  The  speeches  that  were  made 
bring  out  that  the  purpose  of  American  action  was  peace 
and  freedom  for  the  Island  of  Cuba.  No  considerable 
group  of  people  or  politicians  talked  of  annexation  or  con 
quest. 

The  resolutions  that  were  finally  passed  give  testimony  to 
the  inchoate  form  of  the  revolt  that  was  under  way.     After 


240     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

three  years  of  insurrection  there  was  as  yet  no  Cuban  gov 
ernment  in  existence  entitled  to  even  de  facto  recognition. 

'  The  people  of  Cuba  were  recognizejd  as  entitled  to  freedom, 
which  Congress  pledged  itself  to  bring  about,  disclaiming 

j"any  disposition  or  intention  to  exercise  sovereignty,  juris 
diction,  or  control  over  said  island  except  for  the  pacification 
thereof";  and  the  President  was  directed  to  this  end  to 
make  immediate  demands  on  Spain  for  withdrawal  from 
Cuba,  and  to  follow  refusal  of  withdrawal  by  armed  inter 
vention.  The  final  passage  of  the  resolutions  on  the  2Oth  of 
April  was  accepted  by  Spain  as  an  act  of  war.  The  Spanish 
Minister  in  Washington  at  once  demanded  and  received  his 
passports,  and  an  ultimatum  cabled  toWoodford  for  delivery 
at  Madrid  was  never  presented  because  of  his  dismissal  ty 
the  Spanish  Government.  By  a  subsequent  resolution  Con 
gress  declared  that  a  state  of  war  began  on  April  21 ;  a 
blockade  of  Cuba  was  ordered  on  April  22,  and  on  the  same 
day  Congress  followed  its  usual  course  in  military  prepara 
tion  by  enacting  a  law  for  the  creation  of  an  army  after  the 
war  had  been  declared. 

Three  days  after  the  beginning  of  the  war,  on  April  24, 
a  British  proclamation  of  neutrality  made  it  impossible  for 
Dewey  at  Dewey  to  continue  at  Hongkong  the  outfitting  of 
Manila  ^is  fleet  The  war  itself  had  brought  into  opera 

tion  the  orders  he  had  received  from  Secretary  Roosevelt.  On 
the  25th  he  withdrew  from  Hongkong  for  a  near-by  harbor, 
and  a  few  hours  later  on  his  flagship  the  Olympia  started 
for  Manila  Bay.  Williams,  the  former  consul  at  Manila, 
came  upon  the  flagship  on  the  27th,  the  day  on  which 
Matanzas,  on  the  Cuban  coast,  was  bombarded  by  vessels 
from  the  Atlantic  squadron,  with  resulting  casualties,  if  one 
may  trust  the  Spanish  governor,  of  a  single  mule.  On  the 
early  morning  of  May  i,  the  Olympia  led  the  American 
squadron  in  through  the  capes  at  the  mouth  of  Manila  Bay, 
passing  over  anchored  mines  that  ought  to  have  destroyed 
it,  and  under  guns  on  shore  emplacements  that  ought  to 
have  controlled  the  entrance.  It  found  the  Spanish  fleet 
drawn  up  along  the  water-front  of  Manila  and  in  leisurely 


THE  WAR  WITH  SPAIN  241 

fashion,  against  only  an  unexpectedly  perfunctory  defense, 
destroyed  the  fleet  and  placed  Manila  at  the  mercy  of  the 
American  commander  whenever  he  should  receive  military 
forces  with  which  to  occupy  it. 

The  date  of  victory  at  Manila  marks  the  entry  of  the 
United  States  against  its  will  upon  an  imperial  course.  It 
marks  by  chance  another  entry  toward  a  similar  destiny, 
less  unintended.  While  Dewey  was  battering  the  Spanish 
ships,  off  Manila,  Prince  William  of  Wied,  at  a  meeting  at 
the  Hotel  Bristol,  in  the  city  of  Berlin,  was  laying  the 
foundations  of  the  German  Navy  League  whose  function 
was  to  be  to  show  the  German  Empire  the  pathway  to  a  new 
glory.  The  seizure  of  Kiau-chau  had  already  established 
Germany  in  a  promising  field  of  Asiatic  expansion  whose 
fertility  the  accidental  arrival  of  the  United  States  most 
gravely  threatened. 

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL  NOTE 

Diplomatic  correspondence  preceding  the  war  with  Spain  is  in  the  vol 
umes  of  U.S.  Foreign  Relations,  1895-98,  and  has  been  summarized  in 
three  important  studies:  H.  E.  Flack,  Spanish-American  Diplomatic  Rela 
tions  preceding  the  War  of  1898  (1906) ;  E.  J.  Benton,  International  Law  and 
Diplomacy  of  the  Spanish-American  War  (1908);  and  F.  E.  Chadwick,  The 
Relations  of  the  United  States  and  Spain:  Diplomacy  (1909).  J.  M.  Calla- 
han,  Cuba  and  International  Relations  (1899),  is  valuable.  C.  S.  Olcott, 
William  McKinley  (1916),  is  the  best  work  available  on  its  subject,  but 
needs  to  be  supplemented  by  Henry  Cabot  Lodge,  The  War  with  Spain 
(1899),  and  John  D.  Long,  The  New  American  Navy  (1903).  There  are 
biographies  or  autobiographies  of  George  Dewey,  Winfield  Scott  Schley, 
Alfred  T.  Mahan,  Charles  D.  Sigsbee. 


CHAPTER  XXV 

THE  INVASION  OF  CUBA 

j  THE  immediate  consequence  of  Dewey's  victory  at  Manila 
was  a  need  for  an  occupying  army.  The  Spanish  fleet  had 
been  destroyed  and  Manila  was  within  reach,  but  the  Span 
ish  land  forces  still  occupied  Luzon  and  the  adjacent  islands, 
and  there  were  no  troops  at  Dewey's  disposal  for  grasping 
the  fruits  of  victory.  The  Spanish  forces  were  already  en 
gaged,  in  the  Philippines  as  in  Cuba,  in  putting  down  a 
native  revolt.  A  prominent  native  leader,  Emilio  Agui- 
naldo,  whom  the  war  found  in  exile  in  China,  was  brought 
back  to  the  islands  by  Dewey  for  the  purpose  of  keeping 
the  revolt  alive.  The  first  specific  demand  upon  the  War 
Department  was  for  an  expeditionary  force,  which  was 
speedily  assembled  in  San  Francisco  under  General  Wes 
ley  Merritt,  and  which  on  August  13,  1898,  occupied  the 
city  of  Manila  by  assault. 

As  in  the  case  of  the  voyage  of  the  Oregon,  the  operations 
in  the  Philippines  brought  an  old  movement  to  final  fruition. 
/  The  Philip-  ^ne  Oregon  constituted  an  object-lesson  whose 
pines  and  teachings  made  the  Panama  Canal  imperative. 
The  possession  of  Manila  revealed  the  strategic 
importance  of  the  Hawaiian  Islands.  A  movement  for  the 
annexation  of  these  islands,  arising  locally  in  their  Ameri 
can  population,  had  been  encouraged  by  President  Harrispn 
and  snubbed  by  Cleveland.  President  McKinley  negotiated 
a  treaty  for  its  consummation  in  1897,  but  the  Senate  failed 
y  to  ratify  it.  On  July  7,  1898,  Congress  took  the  project  out 
of  the  hands  of  the  Senate,  and  passed  a  joint  resolution 
as  a  consequence  of  which  the  Republic  of  Hawaii  was- 
annexed  to  the  United  States.  On  June  14,  1900,  it  was 
given  status  as  a  Territory  of  the  United  States. 

Congress  had  begun  its  debate  upon  the  formation  of  an 
army  during  the  concluding  weeks  of  the  diplomatic  dis- 


THE  INVASION  OF  CUBA  243 

cussion  with  Spain.     It  was  conceded  that  the  basis  must 
be  the  regular  army,  which  on  April  i  comprised    Army  legis- 
2143  officers  and  26,040  enlisted  men,  the  or-    latlon 
ganized   National   Guard  of  the  States,   and  volunteers. 
The  regular  army  was  on  April  26  authorized  to  be  raised 
in  strength  to  62,597.     The  volunteer  army  was  authorized 
four  days  earlier,  and  upon  April  23  President  McKinley 
issued  a  call  for  125,000  volunteers  apportioned  among  the' 
States.     By  August,  when  mobilization  was  complete,  the 
volunteer  army  comprised  8785  officers  and  207,244  men. 

The  volunteer  law  authorized  the  President  to  accept  three 
volunteer  regiments  of  cavalry.     Of  these  the  most  impor 
tant  was  raised  by  Leonard  Wood,  a  captain  in  the  Medicals 
Corps,  who  was  to  be  "advanced  within  a  few  months  from    , 
attending  surgeon  to  major-general  of  volunteers,"    and 
who  was  actively  supported  by  his  friend,  Assistant  Secre 
tary  of  the  Navy  Roosevelt.     The  regiment  was  recruited 
among  the  outdoor  men  who  perpetuated  the  tradition  of 
the  frontier  marksman  whom  Roosevelt  described  in  his 
Winning  of  the  West.     Under  the  nickname  of  the  "  Rough \ 
Riders"  it  became  the  most  widely  known  single  unit  in<* 
the  war. 

Not  until  after  the  passage  of  the  army  bills  in  April  did 
the  War  Department  hold  itself  at  liberty  to  begin  specific 
preparations  for  war.  The  regular  army  was  as  usual 
diffused  on  duty  throughout  the  country.  The  Secretary 
of  War,  General  Russell  A.  Alger,  of  Michigan,  had  been 
chosen  because  of  his  political  importance  to  the  Hanna- 
McKinley  organization.  His  Civil  War  record  had  been 
so  dubious  that  McKinley  had  deferred  appointment  until 
Senator  Julius  C.  Burrows,  of  Michigan,  had  personally  in 
vestigated  and  underwritten  it.  The  army  itself  was  under 
command  of  General  Nelson  A.  Miles,  senior  major-general 
with  long  years  of  Indian  police  experience  on  the  plains 
and  the  recollection  of  a  lad's  gallant  services  in  the  Civil 
War.  The  administrative  bureaus  of  the  War  Department 
were  in  command  of  elderly  officers  whose  business  routine 
had  been  unbroken  for  years.  The  line  officers  of  the  army  * 


244     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

and  the  enlisted  men  were  well  trained  and  effective  in  their 
/work,  but  no  general  plans  for  any  war  existed  in  the  depart 
ment,  nor  was  there  a  planning  agency  fit  to  execute  them. 
The  normal  consequence  of  an  army  under  command  of  its 
senior  officers,  with  the  rule  of  seniority  generally  applied, 
was  an  army  under  the  command  of  its  least  flexible  and 
most  irascible  leaders,  whose  careers  were  already  behind 
them. 

One  of  the  statutes  passed  by  Congress  in  anticipation 
of  war  was  an  appropriation  of  fifty  million  dollars,  on 
March  9  "for  national  defense  and  for  each  and  every 
purpose  connected  therewith,  to  be  expended  at  the  dis 
cretion  of  the  President."  This  fund  was  expended  largely 
in  guarding  the  coast  and  strengthening  the  navy.  It 
was  ruled,  said  Secretary  Alger,  that  the  accumulation  of 
military  supplies  by  the  army  was  offensive  rather  than 
defensive,  and  his  establishment  accordingly  watched  the 
approach  of  the  crisis  without  funds  or  authority  to  pre 
pare  to  meet  it.  The  passage  of  the  army  bills  and  the 
ycalls  for  volunteers  precipitated  immediate  action  and  ex 
pansion  that  strained  the  administrative  capacity  of  the 
War  Department's  bureaus.  General  Merritt's  expedition 
ary  force  was  got  ready  first,  and  then  units  of  the  regular 
army  were  mobilized  at  Tampa  to  constitute  the  nucleus 
of  an  army  for  Cuban  invasion,  while  the  volunteer  forces 
were  mostly  assembled  in  training  camp  at  Chickamauga. 

The  First  Volunteer  Cavalry  selected  San  Antonio  as  its 
mobilizing  point,  and  proceeded  thence  to  join  the  regu 
lars  at  Tampa.  Its  senior  officers  were  thoroughly  familiar 
with  the  channels  which  led  to  action  in  the  departments, 
and  secured  for  their  volunteer  force  the  greatest  of  military 
opportunities.  General  William  R.  Shafter,  from  Michigan, 
as  were  Secretary  Alger  and  Senator  Burrows,  was  gi've,n 
command  of  the  invading  army,  which  was  about  17,000 
strong  by  the  first  of  June.  His  camp  at  Tampa  lay  at  the 
end  of  a  single-track  railroad,  and  was  a  rising  winter  resort 
of  the  Florida  west  coast.  Hither  trainloads  of  troops  and 
supplies  were  shipped  sometimes  without  orders  or  bills  of 


THE  INVASION  OF  CUBA  245 

lading.  The  war  correspondents  crowded  the  veranda  of 
the  great  resort  hotel  waiting  for  something  to  happen,  and  * 
describing  the  confusion  of  a  planless  mobilization  as  in 
cisively  as  they  dared.  General  Adna  R.  Chaffee,  later 
chief  of  staff,  but  then  lieutenant-colonel  of  the  Third  Cav 
alry,  in  charge  of  a  division,  witnessed  at  Tampa  "the  com 
plete  breaking  down  of  the  quartermaster  and  commissary 
departments."  The  medical  department  did  not  break 
down  until  it  reached  the  field. 

The  immediate  objective  of  the  army  of  invasion  remained  « 
to  be  determined  as  events  developed.     There  wrere  plans 
for  raiding  the  Cuban  coast,  and  for  an  invasion  of  the  Ha- . 
vana  district  the  following  winter,  after  the  new  recruits 
had  received  their  training;  but  before  the  end  of  May  the 
activities  of  the  navy  had  revealed  a  special  need  for  co-    . 
operation  by  the  army. 

Before  the  outbreak  of  the  war  the  navy  had  mobilized 
in  the  Chesapeake.  Captain  W.  T.  Sampson  had  been  ele 
vated  to  command  of  the  North  Atlantic  fleet, 
and  a  portion  of  his  force  had  been  grouped  as  a 
flying  squadron  for  patrol  work  under  the  com- 
mand  of  Commodore  Winfield  S.  Schley.  On 
paper  the  Spanish  fleet  excelled  the  American  fleet  in 
major  units,  tonnage,  and  broadside  strength.  It  was 
known  that  no  considerable  naval  force  was  in  the  Car 
ibbean,  and  that  Admiral  Cervera  was  gathering  his  fleet 
at  the  Cape  Verde  Islands,  with  a  destination  unannounced 
but  certain.  As  Mahan  had  pointed  out  a  decade  earlier, 
the  effective  radius  of  a  modern  fleet  was  the  bunker  capac 
ity  of  its  units,  while  its  speed  was  determined  by  that  oft 
its  slowest  member.  The  strategy  board  on  which  Mahan 
was  now  sitting  was  rightly  convinced  that  Cervera  could 
have  no  destination  except  some  Spanish  port  in  Cuba  or 
Porto  Rico,  with  the  former  more  probable  since  he  carried 
supplies  for  the  army  in  Havana.  No  fleet  could  cross 
the  Atlantic  and  be  ready  for  immediate  maneuver  against 
the  enemy,  and  the  Spanish  fleet  could  not  hope  to  find  the 
facilities  for  recoaling  and  repair  except  at  the  Spanish 


246     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

ports  of  San  Juan,  in  Porto  Rico,  or  Havana,  Cienfuegos,  or 
Santiago,  in  Cuba.  With  entire  certainty  the  Navy  De- 
*  partment  prepared  to  intercept  .the  Spanish  fleet  which 
sailed  on  April  29,  and  to  destroy  it  at  sea  before  it  reached 
shelter  in  a  Spanish  colonial  port. 

Under  the  command  of  Sampson,  the  North  Atlantic 
fleet  maintained  the  blockade  of  Cuban  waters,  where 
Patrol  of  tne  Oregon  joined  it  after  her  thrilling  trip  on 
Cuban  May  24;  the  flying  squadron  under  Schley  was 

detailed  to  patrol  the  southern  coast  of  Cuba, 
and  left  Key  West  for  that  duty  on  May  19.  The  rest  of 
Sampson's  command,  under  his  immediate  control,  watched 
the  passages  leading  to  Cuba  from  the  north  between  Porto 
Rico  and  the  Florida  channel. 

The  strategic  certainty  of  the  Navy  Department  was  dis 
turbed  by  the  nervousness  of  the  seaboard  cities.  From 
Savannah  to  Portland  there  was  apprehension  of  a  Spanish 
bombardment.  Mythical  Spanish  warships  were  daily  re 
ported  in  the  newspapers,  and  nearly  as  often  delegations 
of  Congressmen  waited  upon  the  Secretary  of  the  Navy  to 
remind  him  of  his  duty  to  protect  their  constituents.  The 
political  pressure  was  so  great  that  at  least  apparent  com 
pliance  had  to  follow,  and  various  unseaworthy  gunboats, 
manned  with  little  more  than  minimum  crews  for  naviga 
tion  alone,  were  dispatched  to  lie  offshore  and  give  comfort 
to  the  nervous  souls  of  seaboard  citizens. 

The  patrol  of  the  Cuban  coast  from  May  19  until  June  i 
became  at  a  later  date  the  occasion  for  a  naval  investiga 
tion  which  made  public  many  of  the  facts  of  the  naval  war. 
Its  chief  intent  was  frustrated  by  the  fact  that  on  May  19, 
as  Schley  set  sail  from  Key  \Vest,  Cervera  steamed  into  the 
landlocked  harbor  of  Santiago.  The  news  of  his  safe  ar 
rival  in  Cuba  remained  a  secret  for  some  hours,  and  even 
when  rumor  of  it  had  leaked  into  the  United  States  it  was 
impossible  at  once  to  establish  communication  with  the 
ships  at  sea.  Scout  cruisers  were  hurried  out,  carrying  first 
the  rumor,  then  news  when  the  rumor  was  confirmed,  then 
specific  orders  to  Schley  to  proceed  at  top  speed  to  Santiago 


THE  INVASION  OF  CUBA  247 

and  blockade  the  port.  Yet  it  was  not  until  the  morning 
of  May  29  that  any  obstruction  to  the  emergence  of  Cer 
vera's  fleet  was  consciously  established.  In  these  ten  days 
there  was  nothing  to  prevent  a  coaling  of  the  fleet  and  a  raid, 
perhaps  successful,  against  the  North  Atlantic  coast — noth 
ing  except  the  fact,  then  unknown,  that  the  Spanish  fleet 
was  in  no  condition  either  to  raid  or  fight. 

The  cruise  of  the  flying  squadron  from  Key  West  pro 
ceeded  leisurely  around  the  western  end  of  Cuba  with  the 
idea  of  visiting  first  the  port  of  Cienfuegos,  Blockade 
which  was  one  of  the  conceivable  objectives  of  of  Santia8° 
the  Spanish  fleet.  As  the  cruiser  Brooklyn  approached 
port,  flying  the  flag  of  the  squadron  commander,  noises 
were  heard  that  were  interpreted  as  gun-fire  in  honor  of 
Cervera's  safe  arrival  there.  Even  Sampson  believed  at 
this  time  that  Cienfuegos  would  bear  watching.  For  two 
days,  from  May  22  to  May  24,  the  flying  squadron  kept  up 
its  blockade  of  Cienfuegos  without  learning  whether  the 
enemy  was  there  or  not.  The  harbor  was  landlocked  and 
no  methods  were  devised  to  explore  its  recesses.  On  the 
24th,  on  receipt  of  orders  indicating  that  Santiago  might  be 
the  place,  Schley  resumed  his  cruise  toward  the  east.  He 
arrived  off  Santiago  on  the  evening  of  the  26th,  perhaps  in 
sight  of  the  anchorage  at  which  the  Spanish  warships  had 
lain  for  seven  days.  Neither  Schley's  force,  nor  scout 
cruisers  from  Sampson's  fleet,  confirmed  by  observation  the 
rumor  that  Cervera  was  in  Santiago.  The  next  day  with 
his  bunkers  running  low  of  coal,  and  with  a  heavy  sea  in 
terfering  with  recoaling  from  the  colliers,  Schley  decided  to 
return  to  Key  West,  sending  a  message  to  the  Navy  De 
partment  of  his  inability  to  remain  on  station.  When  the 
weather  moderated,  he  changed  his  mind  and  remained  off 
Santiago.  On  the  28th  he  coaled  his  ships  there,  while  at 
Washington  an  agonized  Navy  Department,  knowing  that 
Cervera's  fleet  was  unwatched,  was  uncertain  as  to  Schley's 
station  or  intention.  Sampson,  learning  of  the  confusion 
upon  one  of  his  returns  to  Key  West  from  a  patrolling  dash 
along  the  north  shore  of  Cuba,  hurried  off  to  Santiago, 


248     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THEJIJNITED  STATES 

where  meanwhile  Schley  had  on  May  29  sighted  the  Span 
ish  fleet.  Admiral  Sampson  arrived  off  Santiago  June  i, 
and  on  the  next  day  issued  a  general  order  for  the  main 
tenance  of  a  blockade,  assigning  each  vessel  to  its  station 
with  directions  as  to  its  course  in  case  Cervera  should  bring 
his  squadron  out,  and  invite  a  fleet  engagement  by  turning 
to  the  east  or  to  the  west. 

From  this  date  Schley  had  no  duties  in  command.  By 
day  the  larger  warships  lay  offshore  in  a  wide  arc  watching 
the  opening  between  the  cliffs  that  command  and  conceal 
the  harbor.  At  night  the  line  drew  farther  in  toward  shore, 
and  the  battleships  took  turns  in  occupying  a  position 
directly  in  front  of  the  entrance  and  focusing  their  new 
naval  weapon,  the  searchlight,  upon  the  cliffs.  In  the 
intervals  between  the  battleships  and  cruisers  that  were 
stationed  from  east  to  west,  in  the  order  New  York,  Indiana, 
Oregon,  Iowa,  Texas,  and  Brooklyn,  were  the  smaller  units 
of  the  fleet,  cruisers,  converted  yachts,  and  other  irregular 
warships.  On  June  7,  Guantanamo  Bay,  some  forty  miles 
east  of  Santiago,  was  occupied  by  Marines,  in  anticipation 
of  its  possible  use  as  an  invading  point.  Thereafter  while 
the  blockade  lasted,  the  various  warships  in  their  turn  left 
their  stations  and  steamed  to  Guantanamo  to  coal. 

No  attempt  was  made  to  force  the  channel  at  Santiago 
and  engage  the  Spanish  fleet  at  anchor  as  Dewey  had  done 
at  Manila.  Dewey,  indeed,  had  received  the  high  rewards 
for  heroic  disregard  of  danger,  and  was  finally  given  the  rank 
of  Admiral  of  the  Navy  for  life.  But  specific  orders  were 
issued  after  his  engagement  that  there  should  be  no  more  of 
its  type.  Sampson  was  under  instructions  not  to  risk  the 
loss  of  any  of  his  irreplaceable  battleships  in  "the  bom 
bardment  of  fortifications."  The  doctrine  of  "Damn  the 
torpedoes.  Go  ahead!"  was  Farragut's  at  Mobile  and 
Dewey's  at  Manila,  but  was  not  a  doctrine  for  a  weak  navy 
in  the  face  of  a  superior  adversary. 

As  soon  as  Sampson  established  his  effective  blockade  at 
Santiago,  he  appealed  to  Washington  for  a  military  force 
to  occupy  the  land  fortifications  of  the  harbor,  and  either 


THE  INVASION  OF  CUBA  249 

to  enable  the  American  fleet  to  enter  in  safety  or  to  drive 
the  Spanish  out.    On  May  30  orders  were  issued    Army  and 
to  General  Shafter  to  proceed  on  transports  to    navT  co- 
Cuba  and  to  join  the  fleet  off  Santiago.     The 
first  week  in  June  was  occupied   by  a  scurrying  aboard 
transports  at  Tampa,  and  on  the  7th  the  convoy  was  ready 
to  set  sail.     The  rumor  of  the  presence  of  a  mythical  Span 
ish  warship  cruising  in  the  Gulf  delayed  the  sailing  until 
June  14.     Six  days  later,  after  an  uneventful  voyage,  a 
junction  of  the  forces  took  place,  and  Sampson  and  Shafter 
entered  into  conference  upon  the  line  of  action. 

The  plan  of  Sampson,  which  he  believed  to  have  been 
accepted  at  the  conference,  involved  a  landing  of  troops 
near  the  entrance  to  the  harbor,  after  which  the  Spanish 
forces  were  to  be  expelled  from  the  hills  and  fortifications 
overlooking  the  channel.  This  would  make  it  possible  to 
proceed  later  with  a  joint  attack  upon  the  fleet  and  the 
Spanish  land  forces.  On  the  3d  of  June  an  attempt  had 
been  made  to  prevent  the  egress  of  the  Spanish  fleet  by 
sinking  a  collier,  the  Merrimac,  across  the  narrows  of  the 
channel.  The  effort  partially  failed,  but  the  cool  young 
commander  who  attempted  it,  Richmond  P.  Hobson,  be 
came  one  of  the  popular  heroes  of  the  war.  It  is  uncer 
tain  what  the  effect  of  success  would  have  been  upon  the 
strategy  of  the  combined  forces. 

General  Shafter  left  the  conference  of  June  20  believing 
that  he  had  made  it  clear  that  his  intention  was  to  make  a 
landing  east  of  the  harbor  "and  march  on  Santiago."  He 
proceeded,  to  the  dismay  of  Sampson,  to  act  upon  this 
intention. 

After  the  conference  with  his  commanders  on  June  21, 
Shafter  published  brief  orders  which  were  to  govern  the 
landing  the  following  day.     With  negligible  re-    Battle  of 
sistance  from  the  Spanish  forces,  and  with  the    Las  Gua- 
assistance  of  the  boats  from  the  fleet   (which 
Long  had  offered  and  Alger  had  curtly  declined  a  few  days 
earlier),  a  disembarkation  was  made  along  a  mining  rail 
road  from  Siboney  to  Daiquiri  several  miles  east  of  the 


250     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

channel,  and  some  eighteen  miles  southeast  of  Santiago 
by  the  direct  trail  through  the  tropical  jungle.  The  first 
troops  to  land  cleared  the  adjacejit  hills  of  sharpshooters, 
and  most  of  the  forces  were  on  shore  before  the  end  of 
the  23d.  From  Siboney  the  narrow  and  much- worn  trail 
through  the  jungle  loam  led  toward  the  Spanish  entrench 
ments  and  entanglements  east  and  south  of  Santiago. 
Without  orders  on  the  night  of  the  23d  the  troops  swarmed 
inland  along  this  path.  The  nature  of  the  terrain  made  it 
less  important  that  most  of  the  cavalry  horses  had  been  left 
behind  at  Tampa  together  with  many  of  the  ambulances 
of  the  medical  department  and  other  wheeled  vehicles  be 
longing  to  the  supply  service.  Along  a  jungle  path  only 
a  pack-mule  could  advance  with  comfort.  The  morning  of 
the  24th  found  the  head  of  the  column  deployed  along  the 
line  of  hills  marked  by  a  junction  in  the  trails  at  a  point 
known  to  the  Cubans  as  Las  Guasimas.  The  Rough  Riders 
were  here  too,  dismounted  but  enterprising,  for  they  had 
marched  all  night  without  orders  and  unchecked  by  su 
perior  command,  in  order  to  select  for  themselves  a  good 
fighting  place  upon  the  front.  The  correspondents  and  the 
military  reports  differ  as  to  whether  the  column  was  am 
bushed  or  expected  the  engagement  that  the  Spanish  out 
posts  offered  at  Las  Guasimas,  but  here  on  the  24th  was 
the  first  military  engagement  of  importance  with  nearly  a 
thousand  American  troops  involved,  fighting  rather  blindly 
in  the  forest,  and  with  some  seventy  casualties  which  fell 
most  heavily  upon  Colonel  Wood's  First  Volunteer  Cavalry. 
During  the  next  week  General  Shafter  established  con 
trol  over  his  army  and  prepared  for  his  Santiago  campaign 
independent  of  Sampson's  force. 

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL  NOTE 

Theodore  Roosevelt,  Rough  Riders  (1899),  is  the  classic  of  the  war,  and 
is  supplemented  by  R.  H.  Davis,  The  Cuban  and  Porto  Rican  Campaigns 
(1899),  and  the  official  histories,  John  D.  Long,  The  New  American  Navy 
(1903),  and  Russell  A.  Alger,  The  Spanish-American  War  (1901).  The 
Annual  Reports  (1898)  of  Long  and  Alger  contain  many  documents. 
VV.  A.  M.  Goode,  With  Sampson  through  the  War  (1899),  and  J.  D.  Miley, 


THE  INVASION  OF  CUBA  251 

In  Cuba  with  Shafter  (1899),  are  narratives  by  journalistic  eye-witnesses. 
A  convenient  summary  is  H.  W.  Wilson,  The  Downfall  of  Spain  (1899); 
much  more  important  is .  F.  E.  Chadwick,  The  Relations  of  the  United 
States  and  Spain:  The  Spanish-American  War  (1911). 


CHAPTER  XXVI 

SANTIAGO  AND  THE  PEACE 

FROM  Siboney  to  the  fortifications  around  Santiago  there 
extended  a  dense  forest  with  no  improved  roads  and  with 
Advance  only  one  important  direct  trail.  Shortly  before 
on  Santiago  reacning  the  Spanish  trenches  and  wire  entangle 
ments,  the  forest  gave  way  to  an  open  valley  through  which 
the  San  Juan  River  flowed  south  westward,  and  along  the 
western  ridge  of  which  the  Spanish  station  had  been  taken. 
General  Shafter  prepared  for  a  direct  attack  along  the  line 
of  this  road,  and  for  an  enveloping  movement  headed  at 
the  Santiago  waterworks  at  El  Caney,  some  six  miles  up 
the  San  Juan  above  the  crossing  of  the  trail.  The  army  was 
entirely  ashore  by  the  25th,  and  in  the  remaining  days 'of 
June  its  units  were  sorted  out,  and  its  brigade  commanders 
were  given  their  tasks  in  connection  with  the  general  ad 
vance  which  was  to  take  place  on  the  night  preceding 
July  i.  The  Spanish  forces  made  no  serious' attempt  to  in 
terfere  with  these  preparations,  but  instead  discussed  with 
the  Government  at  Havana  the  course  to  be  taken  in  de 
fense  and  the  possibility  of  saving  a  portion  of  the  fleet 
through  flight. 

On  the  evening  of  June  30  the  regiments  got  into  position, 
with  Shafter  sick  in  his  tent  behind  the  lines  at  El  Pozo,  and 
deriving  his  information  at  second-hand.  Lawton  on  the 
right  of  the  line  moved  early  in  the  evening  for  his  detour  by 
another  jungle  trail  against  El  Caney  and  the  Spanish  block 
houses  defending  it.  Early  on  the  morning  of  July  I  the 
double  attack  opened.  Its  strategy  was  partly  defeated  at 
the  start  by  a  stubborn  Spanish  resistance  at  El  Caney. 
Lawton,  instead  of  wiping  out  the  Spanish  left  and  rejoining 
the  main  American  column  early  in  the  day,  was  detained  at 
El  Caney  until  late  in  the  afternoon,  and  came  back  into 
line  the  following  morning  after  thirty-six  weary  hours. 


254     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

The  advance  against  the  hills  beyond  the  San  Juan  took 
place  as  arranged.  The  trenches  here  were  assaulted  and 
Battle  of  taken.  The  Rough  Riders,  now  under  the  com- 
San  Juan  mand  of  Colonel  Roosevelt,  charged  at  the  right 
of  the  main  column,  having  their  chief  engagement  at  Ket-* 
tie  Hill,  somewhat  northeast  of  the  San  Juan  hills.  That 
night  the  American  forces  occupied  and  reversed  the  Span 
ish  trenches.  On  the  2d  of  July  the  engagement  continued 
with  considerable  rifle  fire  all  day,  and  by  evening  Shaftej 
began  to  wonder  whether  he  was  able  to  retain  the  ground 
he  had  seized.  The  possibility  of  a  withdrawal  was  dis 
cussed  with  Washington,  while  Sampson  was  appealed  "to 
to  force  the  channel,  engage  the  Spanish  fleet,  and  create  a 
diversion  in  the  Spanish  rear.  Arrangements  were  made 
for  a  conference  at  Siboney  on  the  morning  of  the  3d,  in 
order  that  the  two  commanders  might  reconstruct  their 
plan  of  action. 

The  successful  assault  upon  the  land  defenses  of  Santiago 
convinced  the  Spanish  authorities  of  the  certainty  of  defeat. 
Upon  July  2  Admiral  Cervera  was  ordered  to  take  his  fleet 
to  sea,  and  to  run  the  risk  of  total  destruction  in  the  hop*e 
that  some  of  the  units  might  escape.  He  had  known  be^fdre 
leaving  Spain,  and  had  made  record  of  the  fact,  that  he  was 
being  sent  to  defeat.  The  Spanish  Ministry  of  Marine  had 
known  that  his  fleet  was  hardly  seaworthy,  and  in  no  sense 
ready  for  an  engagement.  The  heavy  guns  of  his  largest 
ship  were  not  mounted  in  the  turrets,  but  were  carried  as 
cargo  in  the  hold.  The  fleet  was  sent  to  sea  because  of  in 
sistence  on  the  part  of  Spanish  opinion,  and  because  the 
/Ministry  feared  that  the  monarchy  could  not  stand  an  open 
confession  of  naval  incapacity.  Defeat  in  battle  would  be 
less  of  a  blow. 

The  American  battle  fleet  was,  as  usual,  drawn  up  facing 
the  entrance  to  the  harbor  at  daybreak  on  Sunday,  July  3. 
Naval  At  about  eight  o'clock  Sampson  started  off  in  the 

battle  jyew  York,  from  his  station  near  the  right  of  the 

line,  for  his  conference  with  Shafter.  At  nine-thirty-five 
the  lookouts  on  the  Brooklyn  sighted  the  first  vessel  of  the 


SANTIAGO  AND  THE  PEACE  255 

Spanish  column  coming  out.     It  turned  sharply  to  the  west 
and  within  the  next  few  minutes  the  naval  fight  was  on. 

Every  American  commander  had  his  orders  from  Admiral 
Sampson  as  to  his  conduct  in  such  a  battle,  and  the  vessels 
immediately  closed  in  to  hold  the  Spanish  fleet  against  the 
shore,  and  to  destroy  it  there.  Commodore  Schley,  on  the 
bridge  of  the  Brooklyn,  assumed  that  the  departure  of  Samp 
son  had  left  him  as  the  senior  in  command  of  the  fleet.  He 
signaled  orders  to  the  other  vessels,  which  appear  to  have 
been  ignored.  The  emerging  column  headed  for  a  few  min 
utes  directly  at  the  Brooklyn,  which  lay  southwest  of  the 
entrance.  Instead  of  swerving  to  the  left  and  taking  im 
mediately  a  westward  course  parallel  to  the  Spanish  fleet, 
Schley  ordered  and  the  Brooklyn  executed  a  loop  to 
right,  and  nearly  rammed  the  Texas,  its  right-hand  neigh 
bor,  that  was  closing  in  according  to  its  orders.  After  com 
pleting  the  circuit  to  the  right  that  carried  it  away  from 
the  danger  of  being  rammed  by  the  outcoming  squadron, 
the  Brooklyn  swerved  back  into  the  line  of  pursuit  and 
speedily  took  the  lead.  Sampson  meanwhile  had  proceeded 
some  six  miles  east  from  his  station  before  the  flight  was 
observed,  and  turning  brought  up  the  rear  of  the  pursuit 
rapidly  overtaking  the  rest  of  his  warships.  The  Oregon, 
Brooklyn,  and  Texas  did  the  bulk  of  the  damage  in  the 
chase,  and  one  by  one  the  Spanish  ships  were  beached  and 
burned.  The  chase  ended  some  forty-three  miles  west  of 
Santiago,  when  the  last  of  the  fugitives  turned  her  nose 
in  shore  for  safety  at  about  half-past  two.  The  flagship 
arrived  on  the  scene  to  receive  the  surrender  of  the  prisoners 
as  Schley  was  preparing  to  receive  them,  and  a  little  later 
that  night  Sampson's  report  of  the  engagement  took  the 
wires  ahead  of  the  report  which  Schley  had  wished  to  send. 

The  overwhelming  victory  at  sea  reversed   the  whole 
military  situation,  and  in  the  following  fortnight  Shafter 
entered  into  correspondence  with  the  Spanish    Health  of 
commanders  for  an  unconditional  surrender  of    the  army 
their  forces.     This  occurred  July  17,  when  the  formal  capitu 
lation  was  carried  out,     The  surrender  was  received  by  an 


256     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

American  army  riddled  with  fever  and  in  danger  of  exter 
mination  from  tropical  diseases  within  the  next  few  weeks. 

/The  army  had  been  landed  in  the.tropics  at  the  beginning 
of  the  hottest  season,  in  uniforms  which  had  been  designed 
for  winters  on  the  western  plains.  Group  sanitation  was 
yet  in  its  infancy,  and  the  medical  department  was  un- 

/  provided  with  medicines  and  hospital  facilities  for  the  treat 
ment  of  malaria,  dysentery,  and  yellow  fever.  There  was 
some  question  as  to  whether  the  fighting  morale  of  the  army 
could  last  until  the  capitulation  of  Santiago.  Thereafter 
it  speedily  broke  down.  On  August  3  a  "round  robin"  was 
prepared  under  the  leadership  of  volunteer  officers  who  had 
no  military  careers  to  hope  for,  asserting  that  the  army  must 
be  withdrawn  to  a  cooler  climate  at  once  in  order  to  be 
saved.  The  regular  officers,  who  were  prevented  by  the 
bonds  of  discipline  from  taking  the  lead  in  this  sort  of  action, 
were  nevertheless  nearly  unanimous  as  to  its  need.  The 

'  responsibility  was  largely  Colonel  Roosevelt's,  and  upon  him 
fell  much  of  the  criticism  when  the  protest  was  given  to  tho 
Associated  Press  before  it  was  turned  over  to  military 
channels  for  transmission  to  Washington.  The  protest 
accomplished  its  purpose.  On  August  8  the  expeditionary 
force  started  for  a  new  camp  at  Montauk  Point  on  Long 

.  Island.  Of  the  total  force,  that  had  been  increased  by  this 
time  to  about  25,000,  four  fifths  were  sick  when  they  landed 
in  the  United  States. 

The  third  of  the  expeditionary  forces  was  put  together 
after  the  battle  of  Santiago,  under  the  command  of  General 
Miles.  It  was  ordered  to  proceed  to  Porto  Rico.  Preceded 
by  the  war  correspondents,  who,  like  the  army,  found  the 
Porto  Ricans  passive  and  indifferent,  it  accomplished  its 
purpose  only  to  be  halted  on  the  eve  of  its  first  engagement 
by  notification  that  the  war  was  over. 

Negotiations  for  an  armistice  and  peace  were  opened  by 

Spain  through  Jules  Cambon,  the  French  Ambassador  at 

Ar   .  .          Washington,  a  few  days  after  the  capitulation  of 

Santiago.     He  found  in  the  State  Department  a 

new  Secretary  and  a  definite  program.     John  Sherman  had 


PHILIPPINE 
ISLANDS 


Scale  of  Miles 
0  50        100        150      200 

Mountains  shown  by  vertical  ruling 


258    RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

given  way  to  William  B.  Day,  an  old  personal  associate 
of  the  President,  who  had  been  Assistant  Secretary  of  State 
since  the  formation  of  the  Administration.  As  the  relations 
with  Spain  had  become  more  difficult,  Judge  Day  had  quietly 
taken  over  more  and  more  of  the  detail  work  in  the  Depart 
ment,  with  the  approval  of  McKinley,  but  to  the  great 
chagrin  of  his  immediate  chief.  Sherman  was  incapacitated 
by  age  and  health  for  his  duties,  and  finally  resigned  on 
April  25,  when  he  found  his  Assistant  Secretary  actually 
summoned  to  Cabinet  meetings.  Judge  Day  met  the  pro 
posal  for  an  armistice  with  a  demand  for  the  withdrawal 
of  Spain  from  the  Western  Hemisphere.  The  draft  of  a 
protocol  to  be  followed  by  a  conference  on  peace  was  handed 
to  Cambon  on  August  10.  Two  days  later  he  signed  it  on 
behalf  of  Spain,  and  the  Adjutant-General  hurried  copies 
of  it  by  telegraph  to  the  three  commanders  in  the  field,  to 
Shafter  at  Santiago,  to  Miles  at  Ponce,  and  to  Merritt  at 
Manila.  Before  it  arrived  at  the  last  post,  Merritt  had  on 
the  day  following  its  signature  stormed  and  occupied  the 
city  of  Manila. 

The  first  problem  which  was  taken  up  by  the  peace 
y  commissioners  when  they  convened  at  Paris,  October  i, 
The  Peace  1898,  was  presented  by  this  post-armistice  cap- 
Commission  ture  of  the  city  of  Manila.  The  American  Gov 
ernment  refused  to  accede  to  the  demand  that  the  status 
quo  of  August  12  be  restored,  but  it  accepted  the  principle 
that  the  islands  had  not  been  conquered  and  that  their 
status  was  subject  to  negotiation. 

The  American  Commission  included  four  Republicans, 
Day,  Davis,  Frye,  and  Reid,  and  one  Democrat,  Judge 
George  Gray.  Day  had  withdrawn  from  the  State  Depart 
ment  to  accept  the  chairmanship.  To  fill  his  place  Presi 
dent  McKinley  recalled  from  London  the  American  Am 
bassador,  John  Hay.  Since  early  boyhood  John  Hay  had 
been  familiar  with  the  intimate  workings  of  Republican 
Governments.  As  one  of  Lincoln's  private  secretaries,  he 
had  come  to  know  Washington  in  war-time,  and  later  he 
was  Assistant  Secretary  of  State  under  President  Hayes. 


SANTIAGO  AND  THE  PEACE  259 

As  a  man  of  letters  he  had  been  prominent  for  thirty  years. 
"If  there  is  a  man  in  the  country  who  is  handy  with  his 
intellectuals,"  wrote  E.  S.  Martin,  "Colonel  Hay  is  that 
person;  but  he  has  been  a  lucky  man,  too."  He  had  writ 
ten  verse  that  he  regarded  as  too  amusing  and  popular  for 
his  dignity.  His  anonymous  novel,  The  Bread-Winners, 
was  the  best  seller  of  1884.  As  the  joint  biographer  of 
Lincoln  with  John  J.  Nicolay  he  had  helped  to  establish 
the  great  reputation  of  a  national  leader.  In  London  as 
Ambassador  he  had  shared  the  credit  for  keeping  England 
friendly  throughout  the  Spanish  War.  He  now  for  the  first 
time  in  his  life  came  into  great  responsibility,  as  part  of  a 
Government  before  which  the  vistas  of  world  influence  had 
opened,  and  which  was  ready  to  give  instant  Adhesion  to 
a  new  idea  of  empire,  the  doctrine  of  the  open  door. 

The  instructions  of  the  peace  commissioners  were  definite 
as  far  as  the  American  campaigns  were  concerned.  Cuba 
was  to  be  set  free  without  encumbrance,  and  probiem 
Porto  Rico  was  to  be  ceded  to  the  United  States.  of  the 
The  Philippine  Islands  constituted  a  new  prob 
lem  for  which  public  opinion  was  not  yet  ready,  and  which 
the  Protocol  of  August  12  had  deferred  for  consideration  at 
Paris.  As  the  autumn  advanced  the  factors  controlling 
their  destiny  proved  to  turn  upon  relative  disadvantages 
rather  than  benefits.  No  thought  of  conquest  in  the  Phil- 
ippines  or  elsewhere  preceded  the  Spanish  War,  and  no 
serious  desire  to  begin  a  colonial  system  was  in  evidence. 
The  most  definite  body  of  public  opinion  was  fundamen-^. 
tally  opposed  to  colonial  control  as  un-American  and  un 
democratic;  but  against  the  disadvantages  involved  in 
holding  the  Philippines  McKinley  weighed  the  greater  dan 
gers  to  their  people  in  letting  them  go.  The  combined 
force  of  Aguinaldo's  insurrection  and  Dewey's  victory  had 
broken  down  the  Spanish  power  beyond  repair.  The  in 
surgents,  although  they  pretended  to  maintain  a  provisional 
government,  had  even  fewer  elements  of  stability  than 
were  in  Cuba.  Independence  was  unthinkable.  The  ob 
vious  desires  of  at  least  one  great  power,  Germany,  to 


26o     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

maneuver  the  United  States  out  of  the  position  which 
Dewey  had  grasped,  suggested  that  freedom  for  the  Fili 
pinos  would  be  of  short  duration.  On  October  25  McKinley 
wrote  to  Day,  "There  is  a  very  general  feeling  that  the 

y United  States,  whatever  it  might  prefer  as  to  the  Philip 
pines,  is  in  a  situation  where  it  cannot  let  go."  On  the 
following  day  specific  instructions  were  cabled  to  the  peace 
commissioners,  that  while  the  President  was  sensible  of  the 
grave  responsibilities  involved,  the  United  States  must 
retain  the  whole  of  the  Philippine  archipelago. 

After  brushing  aside  the  Spanish  contention  as  to  the 
Philippine  status  quo,  the  commissioners  took  up  the  next 
contentions  that  Cuba  must  be  transferred  to  the  United 
States  ratrfer  than  simply  abandoned  by  Spain,  and  that 
the  Cuban  debt  must  go  with  the  island.  Both  of  these 
claims  were  rejected,  and  by  the  end  of  October  it  seemed 
doubtful  whether  the  Spanish  Commissioners  could  be 
brought  to  agree  to  a  treaty.  The  demand  for  the  cession 
of  the  Philippine  Islands,  formally  presented  on  Novem 
ber  i,  increased  the  danger  of  deadlock,  which  was  finally 
avoided  by  the  concession  that  the  transfer  of  the  islands 
was  not  based  upon  conquest,  but  was  in  lieu  of  cash  in 
demnity  for  war  costs,  and  by  the  added  willingness  to 
reimburse  Spain  to  the  extent  of  twenty  million  dollars  for 
her  cash  outlay  upon  the  Philippine  Islands.  On  Decem 
ber  10,  1898,  the  treaty  was  signed  at  Paris,  and  early  in 
*  January  was  transmitted  to  the  Senate,  for  approval  by  the 
constitutional  two  thirds. 

.      The  wave  of  feeling  against  the  retention  of  the  islands 

*  mounted  steadily  through  the  autumn  of   1898,  and  re- 

Congres-         ceived   the  support  of  most  of  those  in  both 

sional  elec-      parties  who  had  opposed  the  war,   and  of  an 

tionofiSgS         j,-..         i  r    D          ur  i.       r 

additional  group  of  Republicans,  who  feared 
national  decay  as  a  consequence  of  empire  and  were  speed 
ily  known  as  "anti-imperialists."  A  large  proportion  of 
the  Democratic  Party  opposed  the  Republican  policies 
which  had  permitted  the  war  and  its  consequences.  The 
/  (Congressional  election  of  November,  1898,  made  it  possible 


SANTIAGO  AND  THE  PEACE  261 

to  measure  these  forces  of  dissatisfaction  and  estimate  the 
political  consequences  of  the  war. 

As  a  result  of  the  election  the  Republican  majority  i 
both  houses  was  increased.  The  forces  which  had  made  for 
free-silver  votes  two  years  earlier  had  materially  weakened 
with  the  improvement  of  business  conditions.  The  war 
had  been  most  popular  throughout  the  Middle  West,  and 
brought  back  to  the  Republican  Party  votes  that  had  been 
lost  for  several  years.  Democratic  campaigners  warned 
their  audiences  against  the  dangers  of  imperialism,  while 
Republican  opponents  pointed  out  that  the  military  victory 
could  be  retained  and  a  satisfactory  treaty  negotiated  only 
by  the  support  of  the  Administration  that  had  won  the  war. 

The  campaign  brought  out  the  one  permanent  hero  of 
the  Spanish  War.  Theodore  Roosevelt  had  already  aroused 
the  interest  of  progressive  citizens  because  of  his  devotion 
to  clean  government,  and  of  herc-lovers  because  of  his  con 
tinuous  and  breezy  appeals.  His  regiment  had  brought 
him  a  larger  fame.  His  defense  01  the  health  and  safety 
of  the  troops  at  Santiago  had  incurred  the  displeasure  of 
the  McKinley  Government  and  War  Department,  but  had 
widened  his  personal  popularity.  He  returned  to  the  hos 
pital  camp  at  Montauk  Point  on  Long  Island  a  colonel  in 
khaki  and  a  national  figure. 

There  had  been  no  experience  in  New  York  politics  so 
refreshing  as  that  of  1898  since  Grover  Cleveland,  the 
mayor  of  Buffalo,  in  1882  became  reform  candidate  for 
governor.  The  community,  tired  of  the  tricks  of  machine 
politics,  whose  notoriety  had  been  increased  by  the  recent 
experiences  of  New  York  City,  turned  with  eagerness  to 
the  new  personality.  The  managers  of  the  Republican 
Party  found  it  necessary  to  lay  aside  their  slate  and  to 
appear  to  welcome  Colonel  Roosevelt  as  their  candidate  for 
governor.  His  canvass  for  that  office  was  his  first  expe 
rience  in  a  general  and  personal  appeal  for  votes.  From  the 
rear  platform  of  his  special  train  he  carried  the  campaign 
into  all  corners  of  the  State,  and  early  in  1899  was  installed 
victorious  at  Albany  "standing  by  the  Ten  Commandments 


262     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

to  the  very  best  of  his  ability,  and  humping  himself  to 
promote  fair  play." 

Before  the  first  of  the  year  there  was  a  real  question 
whether  the  treaty  could  be  ratified.  Demobilization  of 
Ratifica-  ^he  army  nad  proceeded  rapidly,  and  there  was. 
tion  of  the  a  suggestion  for  scandal  in  nearly  every  field  of  • 
war  activity.  The  advocates  of  Schley.  and 
Sampson  were  mutually  conscious  of  injustice  to  their 
favorite.  Secretary  Alger  was  denounced  as  incompetent. 
The  administration  of  Shafter  was  under  fire.  The  Quar 
termaster's  department  was  under  charge  of  criminal  in 
adequacy.  A  strong  minority  in  the  dominant  party  op 
posed  the  terms  of  peace,  while  the  Democratic  opposition 
responded  freely  to  the  arguments  of  William  J.  Bryan 
against  imperialism.  The  treaty  was  sent  to  the  Senate  in 
January,  and  was  ratified  after  five  weeks'  debate,  by  a  bare 
ytwo  thirds.  The  uncertainty  up  until  the  final  vote  would 
have  resulted  in  defeat  had  not  Bryan  taken  the  attitude 
that  the  treaty  must  not  be  repudiated  and  that  any  in 
justices  created  by  it  must  be  corrected  subsequently  by  the 
United  States.  He  turned  his  party  toward  the  idea  of 
ultimate  independence  for  the  Philippines. 

Within  the  Republican  Party  there  was  serious  dissent 
with  Hoar,  of  Massachusetts,  in  the  lead,  but  the  junior 
Senator  from  that  State,  Henry  Cabot  Lodge,  spoke  for  the 
view  that  prevailed  in  final  ratification:  "We  must  either 
ratify  the  treaty  or  reject  it.  ...  The  President  cannot  be 
sent  back  across  the  Atlantic  in  the  person  of  his  commis 
sioners,  hat  in  hand,  to  say  to  Spain  with  bated  breath,  '  I 
am  here  in  obedience  to  the  mandate  of  a  minority  of  one 
third  of  the  Senate  to  tell  you  that  we  have  been  too  vic 
torious,  and  that  you  have  yielded  us  too  much." 

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL  NOTE 

Most  of  the  documents  upon  which  military  judgments  on  the  Santiago 
campaign  are  based  are  to  be  found  in  the  Proceedings  of  Court  of  Inquiry 
in  Case  of  Winfield  S.  Schley  (1902),  57th  Cong.,  1st  Sess.,  House  Doc. 
485;  the  Report  on  the  Conduct  of  the  War  Department  in  the  War  (1899), 
56th  Cong.,  ist  Sess.,  Sen.  Doc.  221;  and  the  War  and  Navy  Department 


SANTIAGO  AND  THE  PEACE  263 

Reports  for  1898.  The  negotiations  at  Paris  may  be  followed  in  the  papers 
that  were  transmitted  to  the  Senate  with  the  treaty  of  peace,  55th  Cong., 
3d  Sess.,  Sen.  Doc.  62.  Admiral  French  E.  Chadwick,  The  Relations  oj  the 
United  States  and  Spain:  The  Spanish- American  War  (1911),  is  the  most 
valuable  general  account,  and  may  be  supplemented  by  Colonel  H.  H. 
Sargent,  The  Campaign  of  Santiago  de  Cuba  (1907),  which  is  a  critical  and 
technical  account.  Much  of  the  personal  correspondence  relating  to  the 
treaty  negotiations  is  in  Olcott's  William  McKinley,  Thayer's  Life  and 
Letters  of  John  Hay,  and  Royal  Cortissoz,  The  Life  of  Whitelaw  Reid 
(1921).  D.  C.  Worcester,  The  Philippine  Islands  (1899),  was  hurriedly 
compiled  by  a  young  scientist  who  chanced  to  have  visited  them,  and 
became  in  its  subsequent  editions  the  standard  work.  Other  data  are  in 
Joseph  Wheeler,  The  Santiago  Campaign  (1899),  and  Nelson  A.  Miles, 
Serving  the  Republic  (1911). 


CHAPTER  XXVII 
THE  CAMPAIGN  OF  1900 

No  American   President  has  dealt  with   Congress  more 

happily  than  William  McKinley  did.     His  long  service  in 

the  lower  house  had  familiarized  him  with  the 

and  the^       methods  of  lawmaking  and  the  habits  of  Con- 


n  Sress-  His  special  field  of  Congressional  interest, 
the  protective  tariff-,  is  one  in  which  the  price  of 
success  is  a  high  ability  in  compromise.  The  tact,  sympa 
thy,  and  unselfishness  that  he  had  developed  while  recon 
ciling  rival  and  antagonistic  claim?  for  protection  served 
him  well  when  he  was  removed  to  the  other  end  of  Penn 
sylvania  Avenue,  and  presided  over  the  nation. 

The  election  of  1898  strengthened  the  tendency  already 
*  visible  when  McKinley  was  elected  two  years  earlier. 
Hanna  in  the  Senate  stood  for  a  new  type  of  commercial 
statesman.  Quay,  the  master  manipulator  of  Pennsyl 
vania  politics,  had  sat  as  junior  Senator  since  1887,  a 
worthy  junior  to  Don  Cameron.  Upon  the  retirement  of 
Cameron,  Quay  became  senior  Senator,  and  assisted  in  the 
election  of  his  political  heir  apparent,  Boies  Penrose.  From 
New  York  Senator  Thomas  Collier  Platt,  "  the  easy  boss," 
came  back  in  1897.  'His  earlier  career  in  the  Senate  had 
been  unexpectedly  ended  when  he  resigned  with  Conkling 
in  a  fit  of  petulance  because  of  Garfield's  assertion  of  the 
rights  of  the  President.  As  a  business  politician  no  Senator 
stood  higher  than  Platt.  Joseph  B.  Foraker,  of  Ohio,  a 
tested  "spell-binder,"  strong  in  the  Civil  War  tradition, 
came  within  the  same  group. 

In  1899  Quay's  second  term  expired,  and  he  failed  of  re 
election  because  he  was  under  trial  on  charge  of  gross  mis 
application  of  Pennsylvania  State  funds.  His  attorneys 
pleaded  the  statute  of  limitations  and  he  was  acquitted, 
yet  the  legislature  declined  to  reelect  him.  Upon  the  ad- 


THE  CAMPAIGN  OF  1900  265 

journment  of  that  body,  there  being  an  unfilled  vacancy 
in  the  Pennsylvania  delegation,  Governor  Stone  appointed 
Quay  as  Senator,  and  in  the  following  winter  Quay's  Re 
publican  colleagues  in  the  Senate  were  driven  to  the  em 
barrassing  necessity  of  deciding  whether  to  seat  him  or 
reject  him.  By  a  vote  of  thirty-three  to  thirty-two  ad 
mission  was  refused  him. 

A  distasteful  atmosphere  of  business  in  politics  swept 
across  the  country.     In  New  York  the  Democratic  boss, 
Richard  Croker,  had  shown  a  disposition  which    Business 
indicated  that  "moral  obliviousness "  was  not    inP°litics 
confined  to  either  party.     "  My  theory  is  this,"  he  said,  "  to 
the  victors  belong  the  spoils.     We  win.     We  expect  every 
one  to  stand  by  us.     Because  men  are  loyal  to  us,  you  call 
that  plunder.     I  have  to  make  a  living,  the  same  as  you." 

The  second  Congress  of  McKinley  found  the  Republican 
majorities  increased,  the  Administration  enriched  by  the 
reputation  of  a  successful  foreign  wrar,  and  the    QO^_ 
votes  provided  for  the  complete  fulfillment  of    standard 
the  pledge  of  1896.     Sound  money,  or  the  gold 
standard,  had  been  elected  in  that  year,  but  there  were 
enough  silver  Republican  votes  in  the  Senate  to  prevent 
the  passage  of  a  gold-standard  law.     The  promised  effort 
to  negotiate  for  international  bimetallism  had  been  in  vain 
because  Europe  was  uninterested.     In  the  winter  of  1899  a 
new  currency  act  was  formulated. 

The  great  free-silver  debate,  that  was  part  of  the  Populist  , 
protest  against  hard  times,  illustrated  the  old  truth  that1 
connects  inflation  movements  with  debtor  frontiers.  The 
same  truth  had  been  frequently  illustrated  from  the  be 
ginning  of  American  history.  The  debate  also  revealed  the 
clear  defects  of  the  currency  and  credit  situation,  and  the 
fact  that  the  national  banking  system  had  been  better 
adapted  to  uphold  the  credit  of  Civil  War  bonds  than  to 
maintain  a  flexible  and  adequate  currency.  The  sub- 
treasury  system  was  revealed  as  an  unnecessary  hoarding 
device  to  keep  real  money  out  of  circulation.  Free  silver 
was  beaten  in  1896,  but  it  was  still  necessary  to  establish 


266     RECENT  HISTORY  ©F  THE  UNITED  STATES 

the  principle  of  the  gold  standard  by  law  and  to  devise  an 
adequate  system  for  federal  finance.  This  latter  need 
remained  unsatisfied  till  1913  —  but  votes  were  available, 
in  the  currency  act  of  March  14,  1900,  to  specify  gold  as  the 
standard  of  value,  to  legalize  the  gold  reserve  at  $150,000,- 
ooo,  and  to  require  the  Treasury  to  maintain  all  the  lawful 
money  of  the  United  States  at  a  parity  with  gold.  It  was 
not  clear  that  the  Treasury  could  do  this  if  a  severe  crisis 
should  develop,  since  the  gold  reserve  was  many  times  ex 
ceeded  by  the  aggregate  of  the  redeemable  currency,  which 
included  the  Civil  War  greenbacks  ($346,000,000),  the 
Treasury  notes  of  1890  ($76,000,000),  and  the  silver,  coined 
or  bullion  ($643,000,000),  every  dollar  of  which  lacked 
fifty-three  cents  of  being  worth  its  face  in  gold.  The  na 
tional  bank  notes  ($331,000,000),  based  entirely  upon  the 
credit  of  the  United  States,  were  an  added  burden  upon  the 
gold  reserve. 

The  demand  for  free^ailver  ceased  before  the  passage 
of  the  Currency  Act.  It  was  fundamentally  a  hard-times 
Revival  of  demand  and  the  hard  times  had  yielded  to  pros- 
p&spenty  perity.  The  financial  crisis  of  1893  passed  its 
crest  when  Cleveland  won  his  victory  over  the  forces  of 
immediate  inflation,  and  secured  the  repeal  of  the  Sherman 
Silver  Purchase  Act.  The  depression  that  followed  the 
crisis  coincided  with  the  years  of  the  greatest  Populist  suc 
cess,  1893-96.  The  supplies  of  capital  ready  for  invest 
ment  had  been  exhausted  in  the  speculative  splurges  of  the 
'  later  eighties.  Until  additional  capital  was  accumulated, 
by  the  unromantic  and  painful  methods  of  economy,  there 
could  be  neither  new  investments  nor  the  resumption  of 
enterprises  under  way  in  1893. 

Banks  failed  in  the  period  of  depression,  and  with  them 
went  railroads,  manufacturers,  and  merchants.  Financial 
sobriety  was  the  rule  in  Cleveland's  second  administration, 
while  the  Populists  were  clamoring  for  the  salvation  of 
mankind  through  the  issuance  of  more  cheap  money.  The 
Western  farmers  who  were  the  mainstay  of  Populism  weak 
ened  in  their  support  when  large  harvests  in  1896  coincided 


THE  CAMPAIGN  OF  1900  267 

with  a  strong  market  for  their  grain.  The  farmer  who  was 
out  of  debt  had  little  desire  for  repudiation  or  inflation. 
The  prosperity  that  the  Republican  organizers  promised 
was  visible  even  before  the  first  election  of  McKinley,  and 
was  rampant  long  before  his  second  nomination.  The 
dinner  pail  of  labor  was  full,  so  full  indeed  that  the  indus 
trial  difficulties  that  existed  everywhere  failed  to  make 
a  deep  impression  on  the  minds  of  voters. 

A  revival  of  the  trust  movement  accompanied  the  ne>\ 
prosperity.  The  economies  due  to  concentration  in  control, 
standardizing  of  goods,  and  the  elimination  of  The  new 
overhead  charges,  made  it  profitable  for  indus-  trusts 
try  to  combine  on  a  large  scale,  as  it  emerged  from  the 
stagnant  conditions  of  the  middle  nineties.  The  union 
movement  in  the  field  of  labor  was  developed  at  the  same 
time.  In  the  universities  economists  began  with  a  new  in- 
tentness  to  study  the  fundamental  processes  of  business. 
The  inauguration  of  one  of  the  economists,  Arthur  Twining 
Hadley,  as  president  of  Yale  in  1899,  broke  a  long  tradition 
of  theological  presidencies  and  emphasized  the  connection 
between  education  and  modern  life.  The  romancers  felt 
the  spell  of  the  new  movement.  Bellamy  in  1888  had  pub 
lished  Looking  Backward,  his  vision  of  the  state  socialism 
that  he  believed  to  be  impending.  H.  G.  Wells  brought 
out,  in  1899,  When  the  Sleeper  Wakes,  and  foretold  a  society 
entirely  dominated  by  organized  finance.  Congress  in  1898 
appointed  an  industrial  commission  whose  nineteen  vol 
umes  of  report  and  hearings  show  the  tendencies  of  business 
at  the  close  of  the  nineteenth  century.  In  the  fall  of  1899 
representatives  of  business  and  government  met  with  pro 
fessional  students  of  economics  in  the  Chicago  conference 
on  trusts,  to  consider  the  nature  of  the  problem  and  the 
methods  of  controlling  it.  The  Socialist  Party,  organ 
ized  at  Indianapolis  through  the  fusion  of  minor  groups, 
launched  its  specific  theory  for  the  reorganization  of  society, 
and  nominated  a  labor  leader,  Eugene  V.  Debs,  for  Presi 
dent  in  March,  1900. 

The  presidential  election  of  1900  came  upon  a  country 


268     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

v  inspired  by  its  new  prosperity,  controlled  by  a  dominant 
party  organization  that  was  founded  upon  that  prosperity, 
conscious  of  the  approach  of  the  new  relationship  with  the 
rest  of  the  world,  and  recognizing  a  need  for  the  read 
justment  of  social  relationships.  The  preliminaries  of  the 
campaign  were  offered  by  the  minor  parties  as  they  strove 
to  state  their  issues  and  attract  attention.  The  Socialist 
nomination  aroused  less  interest  than  the  last  struggles  of 
the  Populists. 

"The  first  of  America's  Populists  was  Daniel  Shays," 
said  Leslie's  in  the  summer  of  1900 ;  "the  last  of  them  will  be 
Decline  of  Wharton  Barker  and  Ignatius  Donnelly."  The 
populism  movement  of  discontent  that  rolled  up  the  ac 
cumulated  grievances  of  the  later  eighties  and  polled  over 
a  million  votes  in  1892  had  lost  its  chance  to  maintain  an 
independent  existence  when  it  concurred  in  the  Democratic 
nomination  of  Bryan  in  1896.  It  lost  both  its  organization 
and  its  following.  The  "middle-of-the-road"  Populists 
struggled  stubbornly  for  an  independent  existence,  but  in 
vain.  'The  party  is  gone  past  redemption,"  wrote  one  of 
its  disheartened  chairmen,  in  September,  1900.  Its  prin 
ciples  were  in  a  way  of  acceptance  by  the  larger  parties,  but 
free  silver  had  lost  its  appeal  upon  the  masses  that  had 
demanded  it  in  1896. 

The  Democratic  Party,  meeting  in  national  convention 
at  Kansas  City  on  July  4,  1900,  found  no  difficulty  in  re- 
Renomina-  taining  the  ascendancy  it  established  over  the 
tion  of  Populists  in  1896.  The  convention  shouted 

manfully  for  ex-Senator  David  B.  Hill,  Demo 
cratic  boss  of  New  York,  whom  Platt  had  driven  from  the 
Senate,  but  it  voted  for  Bryan.  E.  L.  Godkin  in  moments 
of  despondency  recognized  his  established  leadership  in  the 
party,  though  looking  upon  him  as  "a  medicine  which  the 
country  will  probably  have  to  take  some  day."  The  gold 
Democratic  organization  that  had  been  formed  by  the 
Administration  leaders  in  1896  had  faded  to  an  empty 
shadow.  The  only  serious  problem  which  confronted  the 
Democratic  Convention  was  the  relative  stress  to  be 


THE  CAMPAIGN  OF  1900  269 

placed  upon  the  old  and  weakening  issue  of  free  silver,  and 
the  new  and  rising  principle  of  anti-imperialism.  In  the 
end  the  platform  stood  for  both,  and  Bryan,  declining  to 
recognize  that  free  silver  had  ceased  to  be  the  dominant 
issue,  destroyed  whatever  hopes  there  might  have  been  of 
a  successful  fight  against  imperialism.  His  speech  of  ac 
ceptance,  made  at  Indianapolis  in  August,  was  devoted 
chiefly  to  imperialism,  and  served  as  a  textbook  to  the 
anti-imperialists  throughout  the  canvass. 

There  was  as  little  uncertainty  over  the  presidential  can 
didate  in  the  Republican  Party  as  in  the  Democratic. 
William  McKinley  had  no  considerable  oppo-  McKinley 

sition  to  fight.     There  were  some  murmurings    and 

L    ,  .  ,  111  i     Roosevelt 

against  him  among  those  who  had  supported 

the  claims  of  Thomas  B.  Reed  in  1896,  and  who  believed 
that  his  Government  was  too  closely  identified  with  the 
conservation  of  business.  But  the  murmurings  were  hope 
less  against  a  candidate  who  stood  well  with  Congress,  was 
popular  with  the  people,  and  whose  strength  was  intensified 
by  the  glamour  of  things  done  in  war  and  still  doing  in  the 
rehabilitation  of  Cuba.  At  the  Philadelphia  Convention, 
which  met  on  June  19,  the  Republican  National  Committee 
under  Senator  Hanna  was  in  command  of  the  presidential 
nomination. 

In  the  case  of  the  Republican  vice-presidency  there  was 
difference  of  desires.  Garrett  A.  Hobart,  of  New  Jersey, 
McKinley's  first  Vice-President,  had  been  a  genuine  asset 
to  the  Administration,  but  had  died  in  office.  The  desires 
of  the  President  and  Senator  Hanna  for  a  successor  who 
should  work  harmoniously  with  the  Administration  led  them 
first  to  Elihu  Root,  who  declined  to  be  drawn  away  from  his 
reorganization  of  the  War  Department.  Root  had  been 
summoned  to  this  in  the  summer  of  1899,  when  McKinley 
yielded  to  external  pressure  and  called  for  the  resignation  of 
Secretary  Alger.  After  Root,  John  D.  Long  seems  to  have 
been  the  Administration's  choice,  but  the  movement  for 
Long  was  stopped  by  the  appearance  of  a  spontaneous 
demand  from  the  body  of  the  party. 


270     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

"I  hope  you  will  not  allow  the  convention  to  be  stam 
peded  to  Roosevelt  for  Vice-President,"  said  McKinley 
(as  quoted  by  Senator  Foraker).  .The  repute  of  Roose 
velt,  rising  continuously  since  his  election  as  governor  of 
New  York,  threatened  to  upset  the  well-balanced  party 
machine.  Some  Republicans  had  even  talked  of  discard 
ing  McKinley  in  his  favor,  and  Roosevelt  had  begun  to 
consider  the  distribution  of  patronage,  should  this  occur. 
He  had  not  been  among  the  McKinley  supporters  of  1896, 
and  his  willing  leadership  among  the  critics  of  the  War 
Department  in  front  of  Santiago  had  created  a  personal 
unwillingness  to  have  him  on  the  ticket.  Governor  Roose 
velt  agreed  in  substance  with  McKinley  on  this  point.  "I 
should  like  to  be  governor  for  another  term,"  he  wrote  to 
Senator  Platt.  "The  Vice-Presidency  is  not  ...  an  office 
in  which  a  man  who  is  still  vigorous  and  not  past  middle 
life  has  much  chance  of  doing  anything." 

The  denials  of  Governor  Roosevelt  that  he  was  a  candi 
date  for  the  vice-presidency  were  repeated  at  frequent  in 
tervals  during  the  spring  of  1900,  but  failed  to  check  the 
popular  desire  for  his  services.  This  popularity  fell  in 
well  with  the  personal  wishes  of  party  leaders  in  Pennsyl 
vania  and  New  York.  Quay,  just  refused  his  seat  in  the 
Senate  by  a  majority  that  included  Senator  Hanna,  was 
not  averse  to  embarrassing  the  party  organization  that 
had  allowed  him  to  be  humiliated.  Platt  in  New  York 
had  managed  to  maintain  harmonious  public  relationships 
with  the  governor,  but  was  willing  to  back  him  as  a  can 
didate  for  almost  any  position  outside  of  New  York.  Dur 
ing  the  days  of  the  convention  Colonel  Roosevelt  was  in 
Philadelphia  at  the  head  of  the  New  York  delegation,  wear 
ing  his  campaign  hat,  visiting  the  headquarters  of  the  other 
State  delegations  in  turn,  and  noisily  protesting  his  un 
willingness  to  be  sacrificed  as  Vice-President.  From  the 
records  available  in  the  biographies  of  Hay,  Foraker,  and 
McKinley,  it  seems  that  the  reluctance  to  be  Vice-President 
was  mingled  with  a  willingness  to  show  McKinley  that  he 
could  be  Vice-President  if  he  so  desired.  A  private  wire  to 


THE  CAMPAIGN  OF  1900  271 

the  White  House  carried  the  story  of  the  Roosevelt  boom, 
and  at  the  end  the  Administration  bowed  as  gracefully  as 
could  be  to  the  unanimous  will  of  the  party. 

During  the  ensuing  canvass  President  McKinley  adhered 
to  the  tactics  that  he  had  followed  in  the  previous  cam 
paign.  He  maintained  the  dignity  and  poise  suitable  to 
his  own  character  and  becoming,  according  to  past  prec 
edent,  in  the  presidency.  Bryan  took  to  the  stump  as 
usual,  but  this  time  he  aroused  no  fears  in  the  hearts  of  his 
opponents,  and  he  was  trailed  back  and  forth  across  the 
continent  by  as  good  a  campaigner  as  himself.  The  Na 
tional  Committee  made  Colonel  Roosevelt  speak  more  than 
three  hundred  times  during  the  canvass.  In  the  heart  of 
Populism  in  Denver  he  denounced  free  silver,  and  every 
where  he  inspired  the  hopes  of  those  who  were  longing  for  a 
higher  level,  in  party  politics. 

Public  opinion  was  badly  split  by  the  old  issue  and  the 
new.  The  problem  of  imperialism  cut  across  the  bound 
aries  that  divided  the  free-silver  advocates  pubiic  opin- 
from  those  of  the  gold  standard.  Until  late  io"  and 

,,  .  r  j«   .•          •  i     j         1  j       the  issues 

in  the  campaign  a  group  of  distinguished  gold- 
standard  anti-imperialists  wavered  before  the  choice  of 
evils.  Many  of  them,  believing  that  imperialism  was  more 
closely  connected  with  the  future  of  democracy  than  any 
currency  controversy,  voted  for  Bryan ;  but  these  were  more 
than  offset  by  the  gains  of  the  Republican  Party  due  to  the 
prestige  that  came  from  a  successful  and  prosperous  ad 
ministration.  As  the  canvass  advanced  the  argument  of 
the  full  dinner  pail  increased  its  grip  upon  the  average 
voter.  On  election  day  the  prosperity  that  had  been 
promised  in  McKinley 's  first  campaign  secured  a  decisive 
victory  for  him  in  his  second. 

The  winter  of  1900,  with  the  presidency  settled,  with  all 
fears  of  repudiation  expelled,  and  with  four  more  years  of 
administrative  continuity  assured,  has  had  no  equal  among 
periods  of  industrial  confidence.  Both  capital  and  labor 
looked  forward  to  a  future  of  unchecked  development,  and 
the  organizations  of  both  the  trusts  and  the  unions  were 


272     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

increased  in  size  and  projected  further  throughout  the  peo 
ple.  The  feeling  of  assurance  pervading  the  country  was 
partly  based  upon  the  absence  of  any  disturbing  national 
program.  The  two  things  for  which  the  Republican 
Party  had  perfected  its  organization  in  1896  had  been  ac 
complished.  The  Dingley  tariff  of  1897  was  producing  an 
abundant  revenue.  The  gold  standard  had  been  pro 
claimed  as  the  official  basis  of  national  commerce.  No 
great  legislative  programs  involving  fundamental  change 
were  pending.  The  national  need  for  a  canal  at  Panama 
was  within  reach  of  gratification.  The  defects  in  adminis 
trative  organization  that  the  Spanish  War  had  disclosed 
were  in  process  of  correction  under  the  wise  control  of 
Elihu  Root.  John  Hay  was  extending  American  ideals  of 
fair  play  across  the  Pacific. 

The  inaugural  ceremony  of  March  4,  1901,  was  the  most 
imposing  ceremonial  of  its  kind  that  had  been  seen,  but 
lacked  significance  as  a  public  event.  The  Cabinet  of  Mc- 
Kinley  needed  no  reorganization  and  received  none.  The 
second  term  seemed  likely  to  inspire  only  the  uninteresting 
annals  of  a  happy  people.  This  happiness  was  increased 
when  toward  the  end  of  March  the  insurgent  leader  Agui- 
naldo  was  taken  prisoner,  bringing  the  Philippine  revolt  so 
nearly  to  an  end  that  it  was  possible  to  think  of  establishing 
civil  government  in  the  islands. 

The  assassination  of  McKinley  at  Buffalo  in  September, 
1901 ,  destroyed  this  certainty  at  a  single  stroke.  It  brought 
Assassina-  *nto  t^ie  P  residency  on  September  14  a  new  per- 
tion  of  sonality  that  spoke  for  a  later  generation  and  a 

different  era.  It  removed  the  basis  for  the  rigid 
political  organization  of  which  Senator  Hanna  was  the  chief 
engineer,  and  opened  the  way  for  aspiring  politicians  in 
the  Middle  West  to  push  upon  the  party  councils  their 
demands  that  a  program  of  national  and  social  betterment 
be  formulated  and  adopted. 


THE  CAMPAIGN  OF  1900  273 


BIBLIOGRAPHICAL  NOTE 

The  formal  documents  upon  the  campaign  of  1900  are  to  be  found  in 
Edward  Stanwood,  History  of  the  Presidency,  1897-1909  (1912),  which  is  as 
invaluable  as  his  earlier  volume.  Many  personal  details  are  preserved  in 
Thayer's  Life  and  Letters  of  John  Hay,  Olcott's  William  McKinley,  and 
J.  B.  Foraker's  Notes  of  a  Busy  Life.  William  J.  Bryan,  in  The  Second  Bat 
tle  (1900),  gives  an  autobiographic  account  of  the  struggle,  which  may  be 
supplemented  by  that  in  Tom  L.  Johnson's  Oivn  Story,  and  Brand  Whit- 
lock's  Forty  Years  of  It.  Cara  Lloyd's  Biography  of  Henry  Demarest  Lloyd 
gives  the  best  picture  of  the  way  in  which  the  hopes  of  the  social  reformers 
who  had  worked  with  the  Populist  Party  went  aglimmering  when  Populism 
was  absorbed  by  Democracy.  The  autobiography  of  Robert  M.  La  Fol- 
lette  contains  testimony  upon  the  movement  within  the  Republican  Party 
to  salvage  what  was  good  in  Populism.  The  Report  of  the  United  States 
Industrial  Commission  is  packed  with  testimony  upon  the  new  industrial 
society,  while  the  technical  articles  in  the  Quarterly  Journal  of  Economics, 
the  Political  Science  Quarterly,  the  Annals  of  the  American  Academy,  and 
the  Journal  of  Political  Economy,  indicate  at  once  the  nature  of  nev 
problems,  and  the  new  standards  of  economic  scholarship. 


CHAPTER  XXVIII 

THEODORE  ROOSEVELT 

THEODORE  ROOSEVELT  was  not  yet  forty-three  years  of 
age  when  he  took  his  oath  as  President  on  September  14, 
1901,  but  he  had  behind  him  already  nearly  twenty  years  of 
prominent  political  life.  In  personal  appearance  and  be 
havior  he  still  showed  the  jubilance  and  enthusiasm  of 
youth,  but  in  experience  of  affairs  and  political  sagacity 
he  was  as  old  as  most  of  his  seniors  in  the  party.  His  origin, 
and  his  career  thus  far,  were  as  unusual  in  American  poli 
tics  as  the  remaining  eighteen  years  of  his  life  were  to  be. 

Born  in  1858,  his  infancy  was  passed  during  the  Admin 
istration  of  the  self-made  rail-splitter,  Abraham  Lincoln. 
Youth  of  He  left  Harvard  College  as  his  party  was  elect- 
Roosevelt  ing  Garfield  and  glorying  in  the  fact  that  the 
candidate  had  begun  his  life  upon  the  towpath.  The  self- 
made  man,  born  in  the  cabin,  and  ripening  in  the  full  op 
portunity  of  American  democracy  was  still  the  type  Ameri 
can.  Roosevelt  had  none  of  this  in  his  experience.  He 
was  born  in  affluence,  educated  in  a  social  group  whose  posi 
tion  had  been  secure  for  generations,  and  he  was  launched 
into  life  free  to  determine  for  himself  whether  he  would 
make  money  or  leave  behind  him  a  career  of  accomplish 
ment  in  public  work. 

In  the  fall  of  1881,  "finding  it  would  not  interfere  much 
with  my  law"  Roosevelt  accepted  a  nomination  to  the  New 
Early  polit-  York  Assembly,  and  described  himself  as  "a 
ical  career  « poiiticai  hack.' "  At  no  time  thereafter  was  he 
ever  really  out  of  politics,  and  at  every  stage  his  name  was 
identified  with  the  advance  of  self-government.  Three 
years  as  a  young  man  in  the  New  York  Assembly  made  him 
a  national  figure-  "a  light-footed,  agile,  nervous,  yet 
prompt  boy,  with  light-brown,  slightly  curling  hair,  blue 
eyes  and  an  eye-glass,  and  ready  to  rise  and  speak  with  a 


THEODORE  ROOSEVELT  275 

clear,  sharp,  boyish  voice."  He  had  already  shown  a  ca 
pacity  to  oppose  the  short-haired,  noisy  toughs  of  Tam 
many  with  an  equally  short-haired  and  noisy  virtue.  Be 
fore  he  was  thirty,  when  there  was  talk  of  having  his  party 
silence  him,  the  professionally  humorous  Puck  became  seri 
ous  when  it  remarked  that  "  silencing  is  a  process  which 
requires  at  least  two  persons."  He  led  the  New  York  dele 
gation  to  the  National  Republican  Convention  in  1884,  and 
was  equally  true  to  his  standards  when  he  opposed  the  nom 
ination  of  Elaine  and  when  he  supported  the  party  ticket 
through  the  canvass.  His  later  career  as  Civil  Service 
Commissioner  brought  him  for  six  years  into  the  inner 
circle  of  Washington  life,  and  made  an  uninspiring  and  ex 
perimental  national  office  a  center  of  activity  for  better 
government.  His  next  two  years  as  Police  Commissioner 
in  New  York  City  gave  a  new  range  to  his  knowledge  of 
society,  and  his  return  to  Washington  in  1897  as  Assistant 
Secretary  of  the  Navy  brought  him  new  opportunities  for 
action.  He  was  at  once  a  reformer  and  a  party  man,  laying 
down  his  platform  at  the  beginning  of  his  career:  "A  man 
cannot  act  both  without  and  within  the  party;  he  can  do 
either,  but  he  cannot  possibly  do  both." 

The  political  experience  of  the  new  President  was  broader 
than  his  age  indicated,  and  bore  little  resemblance  to  that 
of  any  earlier  President.  On  the  other  sides  of  other 
his  life  he  was  equally  different.  He  was  a  sue-  actlvlties 
cessful  man  of  letters,  a  painstaking  amateur  scientist,  and 
a  lover  of  the  world  of  sport.  In  the  field  of  letters,  he  had 
begun  to  write  immediately  upon  leaving  college,  expressing 
himself  in  works  of  history  and  the  records  of  his  outdoor 
experiences.  His  Naval  War  of  1812  and  his  Winning  of 
the  West  made  him  the  equal  of  any  contemporary  Ameri 
can  historian  of  his  age.  His  Hunting  Trips  of  a  Ranchman 
was  an  early  number  in  a  series  that  was  to  carry  him  even 
tually  to  the  heart  of  Africa  and  to  the  Brazilian  River  of 
Doubt. 

The  outdoor  life  of  Roosevelt  reclaimed  him  from  a  weak 
childhood  and  made  him  a  rugged  man.     As  President  he 


276     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

shocked  many  of  his  conventional  associates  by  inviting 
prize-fighters  to  the  White  House  and  openly  enjoying  the 
opportunity  to  box  and  wrestle  with  them.  He  subse 
quently  paid  for  this  devotion  with  the  loss  of  one  of  his 
eyes,  a  loss  that  he  could  ill  afford,  for  his  eyes  were  always 
weak,  as  his  ever-present  spectacles  bore  witness.  As  a 
naturalist  he  observed  both  broadly  and  accurately,  and 
had  begun  to  pick  as  his  friends  men  whose  interests  in 
science  and  the  world  outdoors  could  run  with  his.  As  a 
charter  member  of  the  Boone  and  Crockett  Club  that  was 
formed  in  1887  he  paid  his  tribute  to  the  romance  of  big 
game,  and  tempered  his  zest  as  a  sportsman  with  a  regard 
for  wild  life  as  a  science.  The  legend  of  the  presidency  in 
frock  coat,  silk  hat,  and  impenetrable  dignity  was  to  be 
turned  upon  another  course. 

When  the  oath  of  office  was  administered  to  President 
Roosevelt  he  immediately  announced  that  it  would  be  his 
"aim  to  continue  absolutely  unbroken  the  policies  of  Presi 
dent  McKinley  for  the  peace,  prosperity,  and  honor  of  our 
beloved  country."  He  urged  the  members  of  the  Cabinet 
to  retain  their  positions  under  him,  and  took  up  the  busi 
ness  on  the  President's  desk  with  celerity,  decision,  and 
confidence  in  his  subordinates. 

It  was  nevertheless  the  turning-point  between  two  eras. 
The  Republican  Party  had  fulfilled  its  purpose,  and  was 
Two  politi-  not  yet  pledged  to  the  elements  of  any  new  pro 
gram.  Before  McKinley  died  the  Supreme 
Court  had  upheld  the  constitutionality  of  the  Foraker  Act, 
and  the  colonial  government  depending  upon  it.  The  gold 
standard  was  established,  and  a  protective  tariff  was  bring 
ing  in  adequate  revenue  from  a  prosperous  country.  The 
next  few  years  under  any  President  must  have  meant  a 
reshaping  of  party  organization  and  an  accommodation  to 
the  new  issues  that  were  locally  appearing.  Under  Roose 
velt  it  took  a  course  unbelievable  had  McKinley  lived. 

Two  theories  of  representation  have  struggled  to  control 
in  the  Government  of  the  United  States,  and  these  two 
theories  met  in  the  administrations  which  ended  and  began 


THEODORE  ROOSEVELT  277 

on  September  14,  1901.  According  to  one  of  the  theories, 
for  which  there  is  no  better  example  than  President  Mc- 
Kinley,  the  will  of  the  people  is  entitled  to  instant  trans 
lation  into  action  when  it  has  manifested  itself.  It  was 
easy  for  men  who  had  been  Republicans  during  the  Civil 
War  to  believe  that  the  party  was  always  right,  and  that 
it  possessed  a  monopolajrf  virtue  and  patriotism.  The 
natural  consequence  of^Jrs  belief  was  straight  party  loy 
alty  with  an  almost  complete  unwillingness  to  scratch  the 
party  ticket.  With  this  went  a  strong  tendency  to  be 
convinced  of  the  correctness  of  any  course  toward  which 
the  majority  was  tending  or  any  view  which  it  espoused. 
When  President  McKinley  shifted  with  the  opinion  of  his 
party  from  a  tolerance  of  free  silver  to  an  insistent  advo 
cacy  of  the  gold  standard,  he  illustrated  this  tendency. 
His  honest  sincerity  was  without  question,  and  his  reverence 
for  the  party  was  supreme.  When  on  April  n,  1898,  he 
turned  the  Spanish  situation  over  to  Congress,  after  he  had 
struggled  against  an  entry  into  war,  which  he  still  deplored, 
he  again  acted  on  the  theory  that  the  will  of  the  party  is 
the  highest  law. 

The  other  theory  of  representation  places  its  emphasis 
upon  the  fact  that  during  his  period  of  office  it  is  the  duty 
of  the  representative  to  act  in  behalf  of  his  constituents. 
Placed  in  a  position  where  his  knowledge  of  the  facts  of 
government  is  superior  to  that  of  any  other  citizen,  this 
theory  holds  that  the  representative  has  no  right  to  be 
guided  by  their  clamor,  but  must  shape  his  course  as 
trustee  according  to  the  facts,  and  stand  or  fall  upon  his 
success  in  leading  his  constituents  to  follow  him.  The  one 
theory  in  the  hands  of  shifty  politicians  leads  to  the  career 
of  a  demagogue  or  to  abuse  of  office;  the  other  tends  to 
develop  the  personal  side  of  government  and  the  high 
responsibility  of  the  administrator. 

The  significance  of  the  change  in  Presidents  as  the 
turning-point  in  history  was  apparent  as  President  Roose 
velt  began  to  indicate  his  own  attitude  on  public  questions 
without  waiting  to  ascertain  whether  the  party  organi- 


278     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

zation  or  the  people  were  in  agreement  with  him.  He  as 
sumed  the  duty  of  positive  leadership  as  Andrew  Jackson 
had  assumed  it,  and  as  Hayes  and  Cleveland  had  tried  to 
do  it.  The  President  in  his  administration  took  a  new 
place  in  the  structure  of  the  party  and  in  the  nation. 

The  position  of  the  President  in  the  party  organization 
has  varied  according  to  issues  ^personalities.  By  the 
The  office  close  of  the  Civil  ^(^the  standard  type  of 
of  President  party  organization  had  been  evolved.  A  na 
tional  party  had  come  to  mean  the  group  of  citizens  who 
were  likely  to  vote  together  in  a  national  election.  Each 
party  once  in  four  years  met  in  full  session  through  its  repre 
sentatives  in  the  national  nominating  convention.  Here 
for  four  or  five  days  delegates  fresh  from  the  body  of  the 
voters  canvassed  their  party  issues  and  the  personalities  of 
leadership.  The  last  ordinary  act  of  a  national  convention 
was,  and  still  is,  to  receive  from  the  delegation  of  every 
State  its  nomination  of  a  member  to  sit  upon  the  National 
Committee  which  during  the  four-year  interval  acted  as  a 
sort  of  trustee  for  the  party  interests.  The  chairman 
chosen  by  this  National  Committee  was  the  tactical  com- 
mander-in-chief  of  the  campaign. 

The  relations  of  the  candidate  to  the  National  Com 
mittee  and  its  chairman  shifted  during  the  period  1896  to 
The  Na-  1904.  Throughout  the  half-dozen  campaigns  at 
tional  the  end  of  the  last  century  the  national  chairman 

really  ran  the  party.  In  the  Hayes  campaign  he 
seems  not  to  have  been  on  speaking  terms  with  the  candi 
date;  and  the  national  committeemen  who  could  control 
their  regular  reelection  from  their  States  came  to  regard 
themselves  as  constituting  the  real  party,  and  looked  upon 
a  President's  attempt  to  assert  himself  as  insubordination 
and  trespass. 

In  the  later  eighties  the  custom  arose  of  deferring  the 
selection  of  chairman  until  the  candidate  had  had  a  chance 
Hannaand  to  express  his  wishes.  Hanna,  as  McKinley's 
Roosevelt  manager,  was  a  natural  choice  as  chairman  of 
the  National  Committee,  and  brought  that  post  into  a 


THEODORE  ROOSEVELT  279 

position  of  great  influence.  One  of  the  first  practical 
questions  for  President  Roosevelt  was  that  of  determining 
his  relations  with  the  chairman  whom  he  found  in  office, 
Roosevelt  had  never  been  a  supporter  of  McKinley,  and 
both  he  and  Hanna  knew  that  the  latter  had  wished 
to  keep  him  off  the  ticket  in  1900.  Both  were  too  well 
seasoned  as  campaigners  to  fight  without  need,  but  both 
were  aware  of  the  impending  struggle  in  the  party  for 
control.  Their  differences  were  political,  not  personal. 
The  Washington  correspondents  soon  reported  the  zest 
with  which  the  President  ate  Sunday  breakfasts  with 
"Uncle  Mark"  at  his  home  in  the  Cameron  house  on 
LaFayette  Square,  but  no  one  expected  the  position  of 
leadership,  assumed  by  the  national  chairman,  to  last  long 
without  a  struggle.  The  President  was  somewhat  nervous 
as  to  the  outcome,  but  did  not  evade  the  issue.  When  in 
1902  the  friends  of  Hanna  in  Ohio  were  reluctant  to  en 
dorse  Roosevelt  for  another  term,  the  President  stated  the 
matter  bluntly  as  a  leader:  " Those  who  favor  my  adminis 
tration  and  nomination  will  endorse  them,  and  those  who 
do  not  will  oppose  them."  Since  the  canvass  of  1900  the 
relative  position  of  the  national  chairman  has  steadily 
declined  from  commander-in-chief  to  chief  of  staff,  and 
thence  to  political  secretary  for  the  candidate.  The 
President  has  tended  to  become  the  responsible  leader  of 
his  party. 

The  political  situation  in  1901  was  full  of  opportunity  for 
a  President  who  was  willing  to  assume  responsibility,  and 
whose  party  possessed  a  perfected  working  or-  Booker  T. 
ganization,  but  lacked  a  specific  platform  for  Washington 
the  future.  On  the  day  of  his  accession  Roosevelt  wrote  to 
Booker  T.  Washington,  at  Tuskegee,  inviting  him  to  come 
to  Washington  to  consult  upon  Republican  appointments 
in  the  South.  The  desire  to  undermine  the  one-party  system 
of  the  South  had  been  the  ambition  of  earlier  Republican 
Presidents,  and  is  still  their  hope.  With  Roosevelt  it  led  to 
an  attempt  to  improve  the  personnel  of  federal  office-holders 
in  Democratic  States.  It  led  also  to  an  unforeseen  attack. 


280    RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

Dr.  Washington,  the  ablest  negro  educator  of  his  day, 
came  to  Washington  to  see  the  President  in  October,  1901. 
When  their  business  outlasted  the*  morning  hours  the  Pres 
ident  kept  him  at  the  White  House  for  luncheon,  a  fact 
which  scandalized  opinion  in  the  South,  and  made  it  more 
difficult  for  Roosevelt  to  carry  out  his  policy  of  breaking 
down  the  barriers.  It  was  long  before  this  luncheon  was 
forgotten;  but  the  Roosevelt  policy  of  bringing  to  the 
White  House  any  citizens  who  could  be  of  use  to  the 
President,  or  who  interested  him,  was  established  for  the 
next  eight  years.  The  powerful  zest  for  life  that  made 
Roosevelt  an  historian  and  a  naturalist  as  well  as  a  states 
man,  at  the  age  of  forty,  led  him  to  bring  within  his  circle 
all  sorts  and  conditions  of  guests.  The  White  House  be 
came  the  center  of  a  charmed  circle  where  the  President 
talked  freely  to  all  of  the  intimacies  of  politics  and  diplo 
macy,  and  kept  his  interests  alive  by  bringing  to  his  table 
the  world  that  he  could  no  longer  easily  visit. 

The  prosperous  winter  of  1900-01  was  marked  by  huge 
extension  of  corporation  activities,  and  acute  struggles  be- 
Labor  tween  capital  and  labor.  Only  an  obtuse  mind 

problems  could  have  ignored  the  fact  that  the  nation  was 
speedily  to  be  involved  one  way  or  another  in  the  contro 
versy.  The  changes  in  corporate  organization  were  dis 
turbing  to  the  minds  of  many,  but  the  inconveniences  due 
to  strikes  affected  the  disposition  of  perhaps  larger  numbers. 

The  last  pronounced  period  of  strikes  had  been  associated 
with  the  panic  of  1893.  The  Homestead  strike  that  pre 
ceded  the  panic,  the  Pullman  strike  that  followed  it,  and 
the  violent  miners'  strike  at  Cripple  Creek  had  been  par 
tially  forgotten  in  the  years  of  depression  when  labor  was 
too  keen  to  get  a  job  to  cavil  at  its  terms.  The  new  pros 
perity  brought  pressure  upon  production  in  the  basic  in 
dustries  and  revived  the  social  conditions  in  which  organ 
ized  labor  can  flourish.  The  United  Mine  Workers  of 
America,  calling  out  150,000  anthracite  miners  in  eastern 
Pennsylvania,  opened  a  new  period  of  economic  clash. 

The  organization  of  the  miners  had  lagged  behin  1  that  of 


THEODORE  ROOSEVELT  281 

other  industries  because  of  the  transitory  character  of  much 
of  the  labor  and  the  high  percentage  of  unskilled  foreigners 
involved.  The  last  upheavals  in  the  coal  regions,  in  which 
the  "  Molly  Maguires  "  carried  out  their  reign  of  terror,  long 
delayed  any  successful  attempt  to  bring  the  coal  miners  to 
gether.  John  Mitchell  took  charge  of  the  strike  in  the  an 
thracite  region,  announced  a  limited  series  of  demands,  and 
maintained  a  discipline  over  his  followers  unusual  in  labor 
controversies.  He  kept  his  men  sober,  he  dissuaded  them 
from  congregating  in  public  places,  established  friendly 
relations  with  public  opinion,  and  secured  useful  political 
assistance. 

Senator  Hanna,  who  was  then  managing  the  Republican 
campaign,  had  good  reason  to  be  anxious  for  industrial 
peace.  The  argument  of  the  full  dinner  pail  would  have 
lost  its  force  if  a  great  strike  were  being  fought  in  a  basic 
industry  upon  election  day.  Political  pressure  was  brought 
upon  the  owners,  who  yielded  in  October,  with  the  result 
that  the  United  Mine  Workers  of  America  acquired  the 
great  prestige  of  a  successful  strike,  and  John  Mitchell  was 
enabled  to  proceed  to  the  speedy  organization  of  all  of  the 
mining  region.  It  was  common  supposition  that  there 
would  be  another  and  larger  strike  before  long,  with  the 
recognition  of  the  union  as  its  dominant  issue. 

In  the  following  summer  the  steel  industry  was  threat 
ened  with  an  upset  that  might  interfere  with  the  whole 
course  of  industrial  expansion.  The  Amalgamated  Asso 
ciation  of  Iron  and  Steel  Workers  that  had  fought  and  lost 
the  Homestead  strike  in  1892  had  been  reorganized  after 
the  panic.  It  prepared  in  the  summer  of  1901  to  strike 
chiefly  for  the  recognition  of  the  union,  and  received  the 
promise  of  moral  support  from  the  American  Federation  of 
Labor  of  which  Samuel  Gompers  had  long  been  chief.  The 
strike  began  in  the  first  week  of  August  and  collapsed  after 
a  month.  The  steel  industries  that  were  involved  met  it 
in  many  cases  by  the  relatively  simple  process  of  trans 
ferring  the  contracts  affected  by  the  strike  to  remote  mills 
not  affected  or  not  unionized. 


282     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

Two  symptoms  were  revealed  by  these  two  strikes.  The 
first  indicated  that  it  was  possible  for  a  labor  body  if  well 
organized  and  discreetly  managed  to  gain  the  sympathy  of 
the  public  and  to  win  its  case.  The  other  revealed  the  fact 
that  in  at  least  one  great  industry  centralization  had  pro 
ceeded  so  far  that  labor  had  no  chance  against  corporate 
organization.  The  United  States  Steel  Corporation  that 
had  nullified  the  desires  of  this  second  Homestead  strike 
was  in  itself  a  new-born  organization  and  had  been  in 
existence  but  a  few  months.  The  opinion  of  the  public 
was  attracted  by  both  of  these  facts.  The  coal  strike  had 
not  proceeded  far  enough  for  public  inconvenience  to  over 
balance  interest  in  the  strikers'  cause.  The  tactical 
strength  of  the  Steel  Corporation  was  a  matter  of  some 
alarm.  At  least  two  issues  were  ready  for  presentation  in 
the  party  councils. 

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL  NOTE 

The  numerous  biographies  of  Theodore  Roosevelt,  written  during  his 
life,  are  necessarily  inadequate  and  lack  the  full  documentation  available 
in  Joseph  B.  Bishop,  Theodore  Roosevelt  and  his  Time  Shown  in  his  own 
Letters  (1920),  in  the  preparation  of  which  Colonel  Roosevelt  himself 
collaborated.  The  best  brief  work  is  William  Roscoe  Thayer,  Theodore 
Roosevelt:  An  Intimate  Biography  (1919).  Other  biographies,  of  varying 
degrees  of  incompleteness  and  laudation,  are  Charles  G.  Washburn,  Theo 
dore  Roosevelt,  the  Logic  of  His  Career  (1916);  Francis  E.  Leupp,  The  Man 
Roosevelt  (1904);  Jacob  A.  Riis,  Theodore  Roosevelt,  the  Citizen  (1904); 
Lawrence  F.  Abbott,  Impressions  of  Theodore  Roosevelt  (1919);  William 
Draper  Lewis,  Life  of  Theodore  Roosevelt  (1919);  Albert  Shaw,  A  Cartoon 
History  of  Roosevelt's  Career  (1910);  and  John  J.  Leary,  Talks  with  T.  R. 
(1920).  E.  J.  Scott  and  L.  B.  Stowe,  Booker  T.  Washington,  Builder  of  a 
Civilization  (1916),  is  of  interest.  Albert  Bushnell  Hart,  Foundations  of 
American  Foreign  Policy  (1901),  is  contemporary  evidence  upon  the  new 
American  interests  abroad.  John  H.  Latane,  America  as  a  World  Power 
(1907),  gives  a  good  running  narrative.  Croly's  Marcus  Alonzo  Hanna: 
His  Life  and  Work,  and  Thayer's  Life  and  Letters  of  John  Hay  continue 
of  great  value. 


CHAPTER  XXIX 
WORLD  POLICY 

IN  the  internal  affairs  of  the  Administration  President 
Roosevelt  was  little  hampered  by  policies  that  had  been 
established  by  his  predecessor.  He  found  diffi-  Hay  and 
culties  because  the  business  connections  and 
preferences  of  members  of  the  Republican  Party  made  it 
easier  to  go  in  some  directions  than  in  others,  but  the 
selection  of  a  final  policy  was  his  own.  In  his  foreign  re 
lationships  he  inherited  two  great  secretaries  and  a  group 
of  well-established  principles  to  which  he  gave  consistent 
support.  Hay  in  the  State  Department  and  Root  in  the 
War  Department  were  well  entered  upon  their  tasks  before 
McKinley  died,  and  remained  to  work  them  out. 

John  Hay  began  his  term  as  Secretary  of  State  in  time  to 
carry  on  the  correspondence  with  the  peace  commissioners 
in  Paris.  In  his  first  few  weeks  the  decision  was  made  that 
led  to  the  retention  of  the  Philippines  and  the  acceptance 
of  the  share  of  the  "  white  man's  burden"  entailed  thereby. 
In  the  earliest  correspondence  with  the  peace  commissioners 
while  this  policy  was  still  undetermined,  the  principle  upon 
which  the  United  States  proposed  to  act  was  laid  down. 
Whether  Luzon  alone  was  to  be  retained  or  the  whole  archi 
pelago,  the  islands  were  to  be  administered  without  pecul 
iar  advantages  to  the  United  States,  upon  the  principle  of 
the  "open  door."  This  principle  was  novel  in  the  Orient, 
where  China  was  falling  to  pieces  and  great  European 
powers  were  eagerly  acquiring  national  concessions  and 
special  spheres  of  influence.  Germany  at  Kiau-chau, 
England  at  Wei-Hai-Wei,  Russia  at  Port  Arthur,  had  all 
since  the  close  of  the  China-Japanese  War  in  1895  exercised 
a  privilege  that  they  denied  Japan,  the  victor  in  that  war. 

The  conclusion  of  the  Treaty  of  Paris,  and  its  final  rati 
fication,  transferred  the  affairs  of  the  Philippine  Islands  to 


284     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

the  desk  of  the  Secretary  of  War,  but  left  the  United  States 
The  "open-  predisposed  to  an  extension  of  the  doctrine  of  the 
door"  "open  door."  The  early  history  of  American 

relations  with  China  and  Japan  made  this  policy 
of  disinterestedness  a  thing  to  be  expected  of  the  American 
Government. 

The  application  of  the  open-door  policy  to  China  was 
made  in  September,  1899,  while  the  European  powers  were 
still  engaged  in  the  partition  of  China.  The  United  States 
urged  this  policy  as  a  matter  of  fairness  to  themselves  and 
to  China,  and  it  was  not  easy  for  any  other  nation  to  for 
mulate  respectable  reasons  for  rejecting  it.  In  the  following 
spring,  when  Chinese  revolutionists,  the  "  Boxers,"  broke 
into  open  revolt  demanding  the  extermination  of  the  "for 
eign  devils,"  the  sincerity  of  the  policy  was  brought  to  test. 
Peking  was  invested  by  the  rebels,  and  the  foreign  embassies 
were  cut  off  from  the  world  outside.  The  United  States, 
with  a  legation  in  the  beleaguered  city,  became  involved 
in  the  attempts  at  rescue.  The  American  troops  in  the 
Philippine  Islands  made  American  assistance  readily  avail 
able.  A  joint  intervention  for  the  forcible  relief  of  Peking 
was  organized  at  once. 

The  ordinary  consequence  of  such  interventions  in 
Chinese  affairs  had  been  the  visitation  upon  China  of 
severe  national  penalties,  and  the  acquisition  by  the  inter 
vening  powers  of  new  and  exclusive  compensatory  rights. 
On  July  3,  1900,  while  General  Chaffee  was  preparing  for 
the  actual  invasion,  Hay  issued  a  circular  to  the  powers 
on  the  aims  of  the  relief  expedition.  Whatever  concealed 
aspirations  any  of  the  interested  powers  may  have  had, 
they  were  forced  under  cover  when  the  United  States 
pointed  out  its  understanding  that  the  expedition  was  for 
the  release  of  the  legations  and  that  the  doctrine  of  the 
open  door  would  prevail  in  the  final  settlement  with  China. 
With  as  good  a  grace  as  possible,  the  cooperating  powers 
avowed  this  benevolent  intention  to  be  their  own,  and  it 
became  Hay's  mission  to  hold  them  to  their  pledge.  Be 
fore  Chaffee  had  been  many  days  in  China  he  found  it 


WORLD  POLICY  2o? 

necessary  to  transmit  a  protest  to  the  German  general 
issimo  of  the  expedition,  complaining  of  the  German  loot 
ing  of  the  Royal  Observatory  at  Peking.  The  astronomical 
instruments  involved  ultimately  found  themselves  upon  ped 
estals  in  Prussian  public  places.  The  differences  between 
profession  and  conduct  illustrated  thereby  gave  reality  to 
the  American  task. 

In  China  the  United  States  operated  with  a  minimum  of 
national  interest.     Nearer  at  home  the  effect  of  the  Span 
ish  War  had  been  to  precipitate  interest  in  a    Panama 
waterwav  between  the  Atlantic  and  the  Pacific.    Canal 

problems 

The  idea  was  ancient,  and  had  been  under  ac 
tive  negotiation  for  half  a  century.  The  Clayton-Bulwer 
Treaty  of  1850,  which  still  governed  the  relationship  of  the 
United  States  and  Great  Britain  to  the  canal,  provided 
that  "neither  the  one  nor  the  other  would  ever  obtain  or 
maintain  for  itself  any  exclusive  control,"  or  "ever  erect 
or  maintain  any  fortifications  commanding  the  same,"  or 
"occupy  or  fortify  or  colonize  or  assume  or  exercise  any 
dominion"  in  the  immediate  vicinity  of  the  waterway. 
When  negotiated  in  1850  the  treaty  marked  a  victory  for 
the  United  States  in  that  it  placed  a  check  upon  the  prob 
able  colonial  expansion  of  England.  In  the  next  gener 
ation  the  American  view  of  the  situation  developed.  The 
Civil  War  added  to  national  self-confidence,  and  when 
President  Hayes  reached  the  conclusion  that  the  canal 
must  forever  be  a  part  of  the  American  shore-line,  the 
country  had  forgotten  that  the  treaty  was  originally  a 
limitation  of  British  power  and  believed  it  a  curtailment 
of  the  privileges  of  the  United  States.  Evarts,  Blaine,  and 
Frelinghuysen  tried  in  succession  and  in  vain  to  induce 
England  to  free  the  United  States  from  the  restrictions  laid 
by  ,the  treaty.  Hay,  when  he  now  took  the  matter  up, 
found  that  Lord  Pauncefote  represented  a  more  accommo 
dating  government.  Early  in  1900  he  negotiated  a  treaty 
whereby  the  obstacles  to  construction  by  the  United 
States  Government  were  eliminated  and  the  canal,  to 
which  the  principle  of  the  open  door  was  applied,  was  given 


,j6     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

the  status  of  guaranteed  neutrality.  To  his  great  chagrin 
the  United  States  Senate  was  insistent  upon  making  the 
canal  an  exclusive  advantage  and  ^amended  the  treaty  to 
death. 

President  Roosevelt  found  the  canal  business  at  a  stand 
still,  but  resumed  the  negotiation  in  an  attempt  to  solve 
it  on  a  basis  acceptable  to  the  Senate.  The  British  Gov 
ernment,  still  accommodating,  showed  no  disposition  to 
encroach  upon  the  indefinite  area  covered  by  the  Monroe 
Doctrine,  and  Lord  Pauncefote  signed,  on  November  18, 
1901,  a  second  treaty  which  the  Senate  immediately  ap 
proved.  Every  British  claim  to  interest  in  the  region  of 
the  canal  was  surrendered,  with  the  single  exception  that 
the  canal  should  be  open  without  discrimination  to  the 
vessels  of  all  nations  observing  the  rules  prescribed  for  its 
use.  The  United  States  made  a  unilateral  guarantee  of  the 
neutrality  of  the  canal,  and  was  left  entirely  free  to  select  its 
own  means  for  its  maintenance. 

Before  Hay  had  succeeded  in  procuring  a  promise  of 
cooperation  from  the  owner  of  the  territory  upon  which  the 
Venezuela  canal  \vas  to  be  dug,  new  problems  of  national 
intervention  control  in  its  vicinity  produced  a  sharp  appeal 
to  the  principles  of  the  Monroe  Doctrine.  On  December 
20,  1902,  Great  Britain,  Germany,  and  Italy  joined  in  a 
blockade  of  the  ports  of  Venezuela,  after  denying  that  a 
state  of  war  existed.  The  claims  upon  which  the  three 
powers  were  acting  were  such  as  always  exist  against  the 
uncertain  Latin  republics.  A  train  of  successful  revolu 
tions  in  Venezuela  had  produced  numerous  valid  claims  for 
damages  against  that  Government,  and  an  atmosphere 
in  which  fraudulent  and  inflated  claims  could  flourish. 
After  long  and  futile  attempts  at  satisfaction  from  Vene 
zuela,  the  three  countries  whose  subjects  owned  many  of 
the  claims  had  recourse  to  force,  having  previously  satis 
fied  themselves  that  President  Roosevelt  did  not  interpret 
the  Monroe  Doctrine  as  guaranteeing  any  nation  against, 
punishment  for  misconduct.  The  first  attempt  of  the 
intervening  powers  was  to  maintain  £  "pacific  blockade," 


WORLD  POLICY  287 

exercising  belligerent  rights,  although  denying  that  a  war 
existed.  The  American  Government  refused  to  pay  any  at 
tention  to  such  a  limited  act,  whereupon,  on  December  20, 
the  blockade  was  made  regular  and  complete. 

Although  the  intervention  professed  to  have  in  view  only 
the  collection  of  debts,  President  Roosevelt  regarded  it  as 
an  attempt  on  the  part  of  Germany  to  test  the  firmness  of 
the  United  States  with  reference  to  the  Monroe  Doctrine, 
and  the  degree  to  which  it  would  be  safe  to  undertake  a 
policy  of  South  American  expansion.  He  determined  to 
force  the  controversy  to  adjudication  at  The  Hague.  Here 
in  the  conference  of  1899  the  United  States  had  assumed  an 
active  leadership  in  the  formation  of  a  tribunal  for  the 
voluntary  settlement  of  international  disputes.  Few  cases 
had  been  brought  to  The  Hague.  The  suggestion  of  the 
President  that  this  controversy  was  suitable  for  such  ad 
judication  produced  no  action  at  Berlin  until  the  whole 
American  fleet  under  Admiral  Dewey  was  assembled  for 
maneuvers  in  the  Caribbean  Sea,  and  von  Holleben,  the 
German  Ambassador,  was  bluntly  informed  that  the 
United  States  would  intervene  to  defend  Venezuela  unless 
arbitration  were  accepted.  The  President  consented  to 
write  a  friendly  note  to  the  Kaiser,  praising  his  activity  in 
behalf  of  peace,  in  case  such  arbitration  were  requested. 
The  note  was  ultimately  written.  The  Kaiser  yielded, 
but  von  Holleben  was  replaced  by  Baron  Speck  von  Stern- 
berg,  who  as  an  old  and  intimate  friend  of  Roosevelt  might 
be  expected  to  get  better  results  at  Washington,  and  the 
arbitration  proceeded.  At  the  time,  the  public  was  un 
aware  of  the  nearness  of  this  breach  with  Germany,  as  it 
was  unaware  of  the  movements  launched  in  the  same  pe 
riod  for  welding  Germans  in  America  into  an  organized 
and  usable  body  devoted  to  the  culture  of  the  Fatherland. 
The  visit  of  Prince  Henry  of  Prussia  early  in  1902  and  the 
development  of  the  National  German-American  Alliance 
were  fragments  in  this  new  policy. 

While  Hay  was  at  work  in  the  State  Department  estab 
lishing  the  new  relationships  which  war  had  brought  upon 


288     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

the  United  States,  Root  in  the  War  Department  took  over 
the  administration  of  the  American  colonies  and  the  re 
organization  of  the  military  establishment. 

orto  Rico  came  under  American  control  as  spiritlessly 
as  it  had  lived  under  Spain.  The  military  government 
Govern-  found  no  difficulty  in  establishing  authority, 
ment  of  and  in  April,  1900,  President  McKinley  signed 
the  Foraker  Act  under  which  Charles  H.  Allen 
was  installed  as  the  first  civil  governor  of  the  island.  The 
revenues  of  the  island  were  for  a  time  enhanced  by  customs 
duties  collected  on  American  trade  to  the  extent  of  fifteen 
per  cent  of  the  Dingley  tariff  rates.  This  apparent  viola 
tion  of  the  constitutional  guarantee  of  unimpeded  trade 
within  the  United  States  gave  rise  to  the  Supreme  Court 
cases  DeLima  vs.  Bidwell,  and  Downes  vs.  Bidwell,  in  con 
nection  with  which  the  insular  policy  was  upheld.  After 
1901  free  trade  with  Porto  Rico  was  established. 

Cuba  became  the  scene  of  an  unusual  international  ex 
periment.  By  the  Treaty  of  Paris  the  Spanish  title  was 
Cuban  in-  entirely  relinquished,  and  by  the  ultimatum 
dependence  the  United  States  had  already  pledged  itself 
to  secure  independence  for  the  Cubans.  The  volunteer 
armies  were  withdrawn  from  Cuba  in  the  autumn  of  1898, 
leaving  behind  them  a  garrison  composed  chiefly  of  regular 
troops.  The  commanding  officer  of  the  military  division  of 
Cuba  acted  also  as  governor  of  the  civil  population.  Among 
the  tasks  confronting  him  two  were  most  imperative.  The 
sanitary  rehabilitation  of  the  island  was  necessary  if  Ameri 
cans  were  to  live  there,  and  the  creation  of  civil  institutions 
was  indispensable  before  they  could  depart.  Late  in  1899 
Leonard  Wood,  by  this  time  a  major-general  of  volunteers, 
and  soon  to  be  given  a  similar  rank  in  the  regular  establish 
ment,  succeeded  General  Brooke  in  command  of  the  island. 
He  had  previously  been  in  command  of  the  province  of 
Santiago,  and  had  encouraged  there  the  experiments  that 
finally  placed  yellow  fever  on  the  list  of  preventable 
scourges.  As  soon  as  it  was  discovered  that  the  disease 
was  transmitted  by  the  bite  of  an  infected  mosquito,  it 


WORLD  POLICY  289 

became  possible  to  isolate  the  patients,  eradicate  the 
mosquito,  and  make  yellow  fever  unnecessary.  William 
C.  Gorgas,  later  surgeon-general  of  the  army,  rose  to  de 
served  prominence  in  this  work.  -^ 

The  organization  of  civil  government  was  well  advanced 
before  McKinley  died.  A  constitutional  convention  was 
convened  at  Havana,  in  November,  1900.  It  proceeded 
under  the  direction  of  General  Wood  to  draft  the  basic  law 
which  was  shortly  adopted  by  the  people.  On  May  20, 
1902,  the  first  Cuban  President  was  installed  under  his  own 
flag,  and  the  American  troops  were  withdrawn.  Cuba 
came  into  possession  of  an  independence  limited  only  by 
restrictions  against  self-destruction  and  an  American  guar 
antee  of  law  and  order. 

Civil  government  in  the  Philippine  Islands  was  delayed 
by  the  insurrection  of  Aguinaldo  that  broke  out  on  Feb 
ruary  4,  1899,  and  that  ran  its  course  until  The 
Aguinaldo  was  taken  prisoner  by  Frederick  philiPPines 
Funston  in  March,  1901.  A  few  days  later  the  insurgent 
leader  took  an  oath  of  allegiance  to  the  United  States, 
which  he  continued  to  respect^  and  it  became  possible  to 
lessen  the  military  force  and  to  begin  the  process  of  trans 
ferring  political  authority  to  the  Filipinos.  An  early  com 
mission  for  the  study  of  Philippine  affairs  under  President 
Schurman,  of  Cornell,  was  in  operation  during  1899,  adding 
greatly  to  the  scanty  knowledge  of  the  new  domain.  In 
April,  1900,  when  the  Administration  desired  that  peace 
might  be  established  before  election  day,  a  second  com 
mission  was  created  under  the  presidency  of  Judge  William 
Howard  Taft,  of  Cincinnati.  During  the  next  year  this 
commission  studied  and  visited  the  islands  and  laid  its 
plans  for  the  inauguration  of  a  civil  government.  On  more 
than  one  occasion  the  difference  in  point  of  view  between 
General  MacArthur,  who  as  military  commander  in  the 
islands  was  trying  to  put  down  insurrection,  and  Judge 
Taft,  whose  duties  were  distinctly  civilian,  became  so 
pointed  that  they  could  be  resolved  only  by  Secretary  Root 
or  President  McKinley  himself.  On  July  4,  1901,  Judge 


290    RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

Taft  was  installed  as  civil  governor  at  Manila,  but  it  still 
required  special  executive  action  to  lodge  him  in  the  local 
seat  of  authority,  the  old  royal  pahace  of  Mindanao,  and  to 
get  the  military  commander  out.  Under  his  direction  as 
civil  governor  peace  was  extended  and  local  self-govern 
ment  was  gradually  applied.  In  1904  Judge  Taft  was  re 
called  to  Washington  to  succeed  Root  as  Secretary  of  War, 
but  in  1907  he  was  able  to  fulfill  his  promise  to  the  Fili 
pinos,  and  return  to  Manila  to  install  the  first  legislative 
assembly  of  the  islands. 

Before  Root  turned  over  the  War  Department  to  Judge 
Taft  he  had  completed  a  drastic  program  of  internal  re- 
Reorganiza-  organization.  One  of  his  successors,  in  1912, 
tion  of  War  declared  that  "until  after  the  Spanish  War  there 

Department  .   .         .  ...  .  ..  . 

was  no  provision  in  our  military  establishment 
for  anybody  whose  duty  it  should  be  to  study  the  organi 
zation  of  the  army  or  to  make  plans  for  it."  In  1886  Secre 
tary  Endicott  had  declared.  "When  a  second  lieutenant 
enters  the  service  .  .  .  the  rigid  examination  ...  is  made  the 
necessary  condition  for  the  commission,  but  this  once 
passed  .  .  .  the  officer  can,  and  but  too  frequently  does, 
close  his  books  and  his  studies;  and  if  he  does  not  overwork 
or  expose  himself  ...  he  is  certain,  under  the  operation  of 
compulsory  retirement,  to  reach  the  highest  grade  open  to 
seniority  in  his  arm  of  the  service."  In  his  first  annual 
report  in  1899  Root  urged  upon  Congress  a  reorganization 
of  the  militia,  since  no  one  expected  that  the  regulars 
would  ever  fight  alone,  and  a  reorganization  of  the  regulars 
to  provide  for  the  better  training  of  officers  and  the  prep 
aration  of  war  plans.  Congress  was  induced  to  respond 
with  laws  carrying  both  appropriations  and  legal  author 
ity.  On  November  27,  1901,  the  Army  War  College  was 
opened  in  Washington  under  the  presidency  of  Tasker  H. 
Bliss,  as  a  post-graduate  school  for  officers,  and  a  little  later 
Congress  provided  the  funds  for  the  stately  building  on  the 
lower  Potomac,  whose  terrace  William  II  subsequently 
adorned  with  an  heroic  statue  of  his  ancestor,  Frederick  the 
Great. 


WORLD  POLICY  291 

At  Fort  Leavenworth,  Root  revived  and  enlarged  the  old 
service  schools,   and   the  Staff  College   for  the   technical 
training  of  officers  in  their  professional  arms  of    Military 
the  service.     When  a  few  of  the  officer  students    education 
detailed  to  receive  this  instruction  failed  to  take  it  seriously, 
their  conviction  by  court  martial  received  the  brief  com 
ment  of  Root,  "  I  think  the  duty  will  be  more  clearly  under 
stood  hereafter." 

The  Military  Academy  at  West  Point  was  enlarged  to 
make  possible  the  training  of  the  larger  number  of  officers 
required  by  the  slightly  enlarged  regular  army.  The  re 
building  of  its  plant  on  a  monumental  scale  was  begun  in 
1902,  an  even  century  after  its  creation.  "  I  think,"  said 
President  Roosevelt  at  the  centennial  exercises,  "it  is 
going  to  be  a  great  deal  harder  to  be  a  first-class  officer  in 
the  future  than  it  has  been  in  the  past." 

Early  in  1903  Root's  program  of  military  legislation  was 
completed  by  the  passage  of  a  new  militia  act,  and  the 
creation  of  a  General  Staff  Corps  for  the  army.    General 
On  August  8  of  that  year  Nelson  A.  Miles  was    Staff 
retired  as  the  last  of  the  distinguished  series  of  major- 
generals  commanding  the  army,  and  was  succeeded  by  the 
General  Staff  of  which  General  S.  B.  M.  Young  became  the 
first  chief. 

Army  reorganization  and  colonial  expansion  did  not 
draw  the  attention  of  the  Administration  away  from  the 
need  to  keep  the  navy  abreast  of  the  times.  Only  four 
modern  battleships  had  been  available  in  the  Spanish  War. 
To  these,  others  were  added  at  the  rate  of  one  or  twro  a 
year,  building  up  a  new  fleet  of  battleships  that  was  be 
lieved  to  be  adequate  until  England  launched  the  Dread- 
naught  in  February,  1906,  and  opened  a  new  chapter  in 
competitive  naval  armament.  Not  until  the  Delaware 
went  into  commission  in  1910  did  the  United  States  possess 
one  of  the  newest  models,  but  its  fleet  of  pre-dreadnaught 
battleships  had  been  able  to  make  a  memorable  demon 
stration  in  1907.  The  national  policy  in  which  these  ele 
ments  played  their  part  was  a  coordinated  scheme,  at 


292     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

whose  head  stood  Root's  administrative  work.  "The  new 
militia  law  and  the  General  Staff  measure,"  said  the  Pres 
ident  as  he  took  credit  for  the  serie's  of  achievements,  "will 
in  the  end  quite  transform  our  military  conditions." 

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL  NOTE 

William  Roscoe  Thayer.  Life  arid  Letters  of  John  Hay  (1915),  is  naturally 
rich  in  information  upon  this  period.  W.  H.  Carter,  Life  of  Lieutenant- 
General  Chaff ee  (1917),  covers  the  Chinese  expedition,  while  Theodore 
Roosevelt.  An  Autobiography  (1913),  includes  new  material  on  the  Vene 
zuela  intervention.  The  two  standard  works  on  the  Philippines  are  D.  C. 
Worcester,  The  Philippines,  Past  and  Present  (1914),  and  J.  H.  Blount, 
The  American  Occupation  of  the  Philippines  (1912),  the  latter  being  sub 
stantially  a  brief  for  the  Bryan  policy.  Mrs.  William  H.  Taft,  Recollections 
of  Full  Years  (1914),  is  packed  with  charming  detail  relating  to  Adminis 
tration  circles.  Other  useful  works  are  J.  A.  LeRoy,  The  Americans  in  the 
Philippines  (1914);  D.  R.  Williams,  The  Odyssey  of  the  Philippine  Com 
mission  (1913) ;  and  W.  F.  Willoughby,  Territories  and  Dependencies  of  the 
United  States  (1905).  Full  reports  on  insular  affairs  are  in  the  War  De 
partment  Annual  Reports,  1899-1^)01.  Frederick  Funston,  Memories  of 
Two  Wars  (1911),  has  a  bearing  upon  the  Philippine  insurrection.  No 
adequate  history  of  Root's  administration  of  the  War  Department  has 
been  written.  His  annual  reports  as  Secretary  should  be  consulted,  as 
well  as  his  Military  Organization  and  Colonial  Policy  of  the  United  States 
(1916). 


CHAPTER  XXX 
BUSINESS  IN  POLITICS 

AMONG  the  destructive  results  of  the  panic  of  1893  was  the 
bankruptcy  of  many  of  the  great  railroads:  These  had 
been  overbuilt  during  the  preceding  decade.  Railroad  re- 
The  railways  to  the  Pacific  had  been  multiplied,  organization 
for  speculative  purposes,  beyond  any  reasonable  prospect 
of  need,  and  these  new  lines  collapsed  upon  themselves  as 
business  fell  away  and  credit  became  difficult  to  obtain. 
There  is  no  clearer  indication  of  reviving  prosperity  after 
1896  than  the  systematic  emergence  of  these  roads  from  the 
hands  of  their  receivers,  and  their  reorganization  in  larger*' 
systems  than  had  hitherto  been  known.  By  1901  the 
period  of  reorganization  was  so  well  advanced  that  the 
plight  of  the  railroads  became  less  interesting  than  the 
effect  of  their  combinations  upon  public  welfare.  In  Feb 
ruary,  1901,  announcement  was  made  of  a  merger  of  South 
ern  Pacific  lines  that  went  beyond  any  precedent  in  rail 
road  finance. 

The  Southern  Pacific  merger  was  largely  the  result  of  the 
financial  genius  of  Edward  H.  Harriman,  whose  reputation 
was  well  established  as  a  builder  of  roads.  It  The  Harri- 
was  founded  upon  one  of  his  successful  recon-  man  system 
structions,  by  which  the  Union  Pacific  system  had  been 
resuscitated  by  him  after  the  panic  of  1893  and  converted 
into  a  valuable  property. 

After  the  completion  of  its  main  line  in  1869,  the  owners 
of  the  Union  Pacific  system  became  aware  of  the  fact  that 
their  property  was  not  a  unit.  East  of  the  Great  Salt 
Lake  the  Union  Pacific  stretched  across  the  plains  to 
Council  Bluffs,  and  found  itself  dependent  for  its  through 
business  upon  the  Central  Pacific  that  ran  west  from  the 
Great  Salt  Lake  to  Sacramento  Bay.  The  opportunities  of 
the  two  roads  were  unequal  since  the  Union  Pacific  had  few 


294     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

near  affiliations  or  friends,  while  the  Central  Pacific  was 
dominated  by  a  group  of  active  California  capitalists  who 
were  equally  in  control  of  the  network  of  lines  known  as  the 
Southern  Pacific.  Leland  Stanford  and  Collis  P.  Hunting- 
ton  were  the  best  known  of  the  group.  Their  boldness  as 
railroad  promoters  was  matched  by  their  skill  in  securing 
favors  from  Congress  and  the  Western  States.  Before  1885 
they  were  in  possession  of  working  agreements  over  the 
Sante  Fe  and  Texas  Pacific  roads,  as  well  as  their  own  main 
line  through  Yuma,  El  Paso,  San  Antonio,  and  Houston  to 
New  Orleans. 

It  was  natural  that  little  traffic  found  its  way  from  the 
Central  Pacific  to  the  Union  Pacific,  if  it  could  as  well  be 
routed  over  one  of  the  southern  lines.  The  Union  Pacific, 
manipulated  by  Jay  Gould  in  the  eighties,  was  driven  to 
organize  a  system  of  dependent  lines  for  itself,  and  piled  up 
a  trackage  of  about  seventy-six  hundred  miles  before  the 
panic  of  1893  flattened  it  out.  When  Harriman  gained 
control  of  the  Union  Pacific  after  the  panic,  the  system  was 
run  down,  and  was  reputed  to  consist  of  no  more  than 
two  streaks  of  rust  across  the  plains.  He  rebuilt  the  line, 
straightening  curves  and  cutting  down  the  grades,  and  con 
structing  finally  a  gigantic  causeway  across  the  northern  tip 
of  the  Great  Salt  Lake.  He  reassembled  the  mileage  under 
his  influence  by  rental,  absorption,  or  friendly  agreement. 

The  Southern  -Pacific  system  and  the  reorganized  Union 
Pacific  covered  the  whole  southwestern  quarter  of  the 
The  South-  United  States.  During  1900  it  became  known 
em  Pacific  that  the  Huntington  holdings  in  the  Southern 

merger  T^      ,r  .  ,          r  __ 

Pacific  were  in  the  market  for  sale.  Harriman 
saw  the  opportunity  to  merge  the  two  railroad  empires. 
The  purchase  was  announced  in  February;  the  Union 
Pacific  borrowed  money  on  a  special  issue  of  bonds,  and 
with  the  proceeds  of  the  loan  became  the  owner  of  its 
former  rival.  The  absorption  of  more  than  fifteen  thousand 
miles  of  track  under  a  single  management,  and  subject  to 
the  control  of  Harriman,  was  a  big  enough  fact  to  fix  public 
attention  upon  the  new  period  of  financial  concentration. 


BUSINESS  IN  POLITICS  295 

The  news  of  the  merger  of  the  two  Southwestern  systems 
had  not  yet  lost  its  novelty  when  the  New  York  Stock 
Exchange  gave  evidence  of  a  mysterious  activity  in  the 
affairs  of  another  continental  line,  the  Northern  Pacific. 
Henry  Villard  had  finished  this  line  in  1883.  The  four 
Territories  that  it  traversed,  North  Dakota,  Montana, 
Idaho,  and  Washington,  became  States  in  1890-91,  but 
their  population  was  too  sparse  to  safeguard  the  road 
against  failure.  In  its  immediate  neighborhood  it  was  by 
no  means  supreme.  In  the  Granger  area  at  its  eastern 
end  the  railroad  net  of  the  Chicago,  Burlington  &  Quincy 
served  wide  areas  with  local  facilities.  Its  western  end 
found  itself  in  direct  competition  with  the  new  line,  the 
Great  Northern  that  James  J.  Hill  pushed  through  in 
1893.  The  Great  Northern,  which  paralleled  the  Northern 
Pacific  throughout  its  whole  length,  was  the  result  of  the 
persistent  enterprise  of  its  promoter,  who  had  observed  the 
failures  of  the  Northern  Pacific,  to  profit  by  them.  He 
drove  his  last  spike  in  January,  1893,  and  eight  months 
later  the  Northern  Pacific  became  insolvent. 

An  unexpected  activity  in  Northern  Pacific  stocks  in  the 
spring  of  1901  suggested  that  something  might  be  on  foot 
respecting  these  Northern  roads,  whose  dominance  in  the 
Northwest  was  as  complete  as  that  of  the  Harriman  lines 
over  the  Southwest.  On  May  9,  1901,  the  stock  market 
broke  under  heavy  speculation  with  no  Northern  Pacific 
stock  in  sight,  and  with  speculators  who  had  sold  it  short 
running  their  offerings  up  to  a  thousand  dollars  per  share, 
in  vain.  The  panic  was  confined  largely  to  professional 
brokers  and  had  no  bearing  on  the  general  financial  strength 
of  the  country.  When  the  confusion  had  subsided,  it  was 
discovered  that  financial  interests  behind  the  Great  North 
ern  and  the  Burlington,  James  J.  Hill  and  J.  Pierpont 
Morgan  and  their  associates,  had  undertaken  to  pick  up  a 
control  of  Northern  Pacific  at  the  same  time  that  E.  H. 
Harriman  had  determined  to  attach  it  to  his  Union  Pacific 
holdings.  The  battle  of  the  financial  giants  added  to  the 
impression  that  financial  doings  were  assuming  such  di- 


296    RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

mensions  as  to  have  a  direct  though  uncertain  effect  on 
public  interests. 

In  most  of  the  railroad  systems  «of  the  country  mergers 
were  under  way  that  were  less  startling  in  magnitude  than 
those  of  the  Far  West,  but  resembled  them  in  that  the 
financial  control  involved  generally  originated  not  far  from 
Wall  Street.  Industrial  combinations  had  the  same  tend 
ency  to  centralize  in  New  York,  and  these  within  the  last 
few  months  had  shown  the  same  disposition  as  the  railway 
combinations  to  grow  in  size.  The  Standard  Oil  Company 
had  for  more  than  twenty  years  been  the  chief  text  for 
speakers  who  decried  the  trusts.  Its  habits  as  a  corpo 
ration  had  been  displayed  in  the  court  records  of  many 
States,  and  invariably  it  had  been  able  to  meet  an  industrial 
or  a  legal  rebuff  by  a  new  legal  or  industrial  device  equally 
effective  with  the  old  and  at  least  not  yet  declared  un 
lawful. 

In  the  same  month  in  which  the  Harriman  merger  was 
announced,  the  name  of  Andrew  Carnegie  threatened  to 
Integration  eclipse  that  of  John  D.  Rockefeller  as  a  pro 
of  the  steel  moter  of  monopoly.  The  United  States  Steel 
Corporation  was  launched  with  an  aggregate 
capitalization  of  eleven  hundred  million  dollars  and  with  a 
clear  tendency  not  only  toward  consolidation,  but  toward 
the  kind  of  industrial  independence  that  the  railroads  were 
working  for.  Each  of  the  great  railroad  systems  was 
struggling  to  bring  within  itself  terminal  points  for  its 
heaviest  traffic,  so  as  to  lessen  its  dependence  upon  neigh 
boring  lines  and  to  escape  the  wastes  of  competition.  Con 
centration  in  industry  had  in  the  Standard  Oil  Company 
gone  as  far  as  it  could.  The  new  Steel  Corporation  was 
more  truly  described  by  the  word  "integration." 

Most  of  the  classic  trusts  were  concerned  with  a  single 
commodity.  They  eliminated  competition  as  their  output 
increased  in  volume,  and  approached  more  or  less  nearly 
the  total  consumption  of  the  country,  whether  of  oil  or 
sugar  or  whiskey  or  tobacco  or  any  of  the  other  commod 
ities  involved;  but  each  trust  as  it  eliminated  its  rivals 


BUSINESS  IN  POLITICS  297 

in  the  same  industry  developed  new  and  equally  intense 
rivalry  at  different  points.  The  producers  of  its  raw 
material,  the  railways  that  transported  its  goods,  and  the 
buyers  that  absorbed  its  output,  offered  a  competition  that 
only  increased  in  bitterness  as  the  trust  increased  in  size. 

The  trusts  of  1901  tried  to  integrate  under  their  control 
the  related  processes  as  well  as  the  terminal  associates  of  the 
industry.  In  the  United  States  Steel  Corporation  integra 
tion  was  nearly  complete.  More  than  two  hundred  and 
fifty  separate  companies,  using  about  half  of  the  total  ore 
produced  in  the  United  States,  were  brought  together.  The 
integration  began  with  the  ore  companies  that  owned  the 
raw  material,  and  maintained  continuously  in  the  field 
their  gangs  of  prospectors  who  searched  the  hidden  places 
of  the  earth  for  more  deposits.  Coal  companies  were  in 
cluded,  and  were  selected  with  reference  to  their  location, 
their  capacity,  and  the  chemical  availability  of  their  prod 
uct.  Coal  and  ore  railroads,  as  well  as  the  lines  of  ore 
steamers  on  the  Great  Lakes,  reduced  the  dependence  of 
the  corporation  upon  competitive  carriers.  Smelting  mills, 
steel  furnaces,  rolling  mills,  and  factories  for  the  final  manu 
facture  of  iron  and  steel  in  all  the  finished  forms  completed 
the  integrated  organization  that  seemed  to  be  as  nearly 
independent  as  any  corporation  could  be. 

In  the  summer  of  1901  the  new  Steel  Corporation  came 
into  conflict  with  organized  labor,   and  was  able  to  win 
without  even  a  serious  fight.      There  was  no    The  Sher. 
doubt  but  that  the  prosperity  that  had  been  so    man  Anti- 
earnestly  desired  in  the  election  of   1900  had 
fully  arrived,  but  there  was  genuine  question  as  to  what  to 
do  with  it.     The  statute  books  of  the  several  States  were 
crowded  with   ineffective  laws  that  had   been  passed   to 
preserve  competition  and  to  prevent  monopoly,  but  the 
only  federal  statute  was  the  Sherman  Anti-Trust  Act  of 
1890,  and  this  was  commonly  regarded  as  moribund.     No 
National  Administration  could  fail  to  take  cognizance  of 
the  business  trend  that  produced  such  economic  organi 
zations  as  the  Steel  Corporation  and  the  Harriman  merger, 


298     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

but  President  Roosevelt  found  little  in  the  recorded  policies 
of  his  predecessor  to  guide  him  to  positive  action.  The 
history  of  the  Sherman  Act,  however,  in  its  eleven  years  of 
activity,  was  rich  in  its  negative  evidences  upon  the  control 
of  business  by  the  Government. 

The  Sherman  Act  forbade  combinations  or  conspiracies 
in  restraint  of  trade  among  the  several  States,  and  might  be 
invoked  by  the  Government  itself  in  a  public  prosecution,  by 
a  private  suitor  who  avowed  himself  injured  by  such  com 
bination,  or  by  the  defendant  in  any  suit  brought  against 
him  by  a  combination  illegal  because  of  this  conspiracy. 
Down  to  1901  it  had  been  involved  in  some  forty  litigations, 
of  which  nearly  half  were  brought  by  the  Government 
against  minor  offenders,  and  in  which  no  jurist  but  William 
Howard  Taft  had  gained  any  considerable  prominence. 
No  attempt  had  been  made  to  break  up  any  of  the  great 
trusts  on  the  ground  that  its  very  existence  was  in  violation 
of  the  law.  The  panic  of  1893  and  its  consequences  had 
extended  over  half  of  the  lifetime  of  the  law,  and  in  these 
years  the  practice  of  business  had  been  too  circumspect  and 
cautious  to  give  unusual  affront.  Henry  Demarest  Lloyd 
wrote  his  Wealth  against  Commonwealth  in  1894,  *n  an  at 
tempt  to  prove  that  a  crisis  in  government  was  approach 
ing;  but  wealth  was  chastened,  and  commonwealths  were 
adverse  to  adding  troubles  where  they  were  already  too 
numerous,  and  no  great  public  reaction  followed  to  stimu 
late  a  wider  use  of  the  Sherman  Law. 

The  political  weakness  of  the  Harrison  Administration 
would  have  made  it  difficult  for  that  President  to  have 
enforced  the  law  with  vigor.  The  attack  of  the  Populists, 
threatening  all  capital  with  repudiation,  drove  Cleveland 
in  his  second  term  into  such  affiliations  with  responsible 
business  as  to  have  lessened  his  disposition  to  become  an 
anti-trust  crusader.  The  party  and  faction  of  William 
McKinley  avowedly  represented  the  demand  that  Govern 
ment  make  it  possible  for  business  to  exist,  and  McKinley 
died  before  the  full  tendency  of  the  new  trust  movement 
had  displayed  itself.  What  he  might  have  done  had  he. 


y  BUSINESS  IN  POLITICS  299 

lived  is  coijectural.  A  revision  of  his  cherished  views  on 
the  tariff  was  in  his  mind  when  the  assassin  struck  him,  but 
he  sketched  no  course  that  could  guide  his  successor.  In 
neither  party  organization  had  there  been  strong  tendency 
to  distrust  or  impede  the  management  of  business. 

The  death  of  McKinley  produced  no  shock  in  business, 
and  the  mergers  that  were  under  way  continued  through 
the  autumn  of   1901.      The  uncertainty  as  to 
what  was  happening  in  the  case  of  Northern    Northern 


Pacific  in  the  May  panic  was  removed  when  it 
became  known  that  the  Harriman  forces  had 
been  defeated,  and  Hill  and  Morgan  had  been  victorious. 
In  November  the  group  of  owners  of  the  three  railroads 
that  together  dominated  the  Northwestern  States  organ 
ized  their  holdings  to  safeguard  their  control.  The  law 
forbade  the  direct  merging  of  the  lines  under  the  ownership 
of  any  one  of  them,  and  the  only  really  important  Supreme 
Court  decision  on  the  Sherman  Act  —  the  Trans-Missouri 
freight  case  —  had  held  that  the  prohibitions  of  the  law 
extended  to  railroads  as  well  as  industrial  combinations. 
The  Northern  Securities  Company  of  New  Jersey  was 
chartered  to  act  as  a  holding  company  and  take  over  the 
stock  in  the  several  roads.  The  complacent  corporation 
laws  of  New  Jersey  made  it  easy  for  companies  to  operate 
with  large  powers  under  merely  casual  scrutiny.  It  was 
argued  by  the  attorneys  of  the  owners  that  a  company 
could  not  conspire  with  itself,  and  that  acts  that  might  be 
illegal  if  performed  by  separate  corporations  became  legal 
when  these  corporations  had  acquired  a  common  owner. 
Before  Christmas,  1901,  the  Northwestern  States  from 
Minnesota  to  the  ocean  were  in  action  in  their  alarm  at 
what  they  regarded  as  the  menace  of  a  railroad  monopoly. 
Some  of  these  States  could  still  remember  their  activities 
a  generation  earlier  in  the  Granger  movement,  and  could 
recall  the  fact  that  the  federal  courts  first  recognized  the 
full  liability  of  a  railroad  company  to  public  control  in  the 
Granger  cases  that  they  had  brought.  Conferences  were 
held  among  the  officials  of  the  States  involved,  where  they 


\ 

300     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

discussed  ways  and  means  for  meeting  the  attach.  In  the 
White  House  the  movement  was  watched  with  interest  and 
appreciation.  The  President  called  upon  his  Attorney- 
General,  Philander  C.  Knox.  for  an  opinion  as  to  the  legal 
ity  of  the  Northern  Securities  Company,  and  whether  the 
device  of  a  holding  company  succeeded  in  evading  the  pro 
hibition  against  conspiracy. 

The  appointment  of  Knox  as  Attorney-General  had  been 
criticized  because  his  professional  connections  as  a  Pitts- 
Northern  burgh  lawyer  made  him  appear  to  be  the  servant 
Securities  of  big  business.  When  he  undertook  to  study 
the  legality  of  this  case,  the  Sherman  Law  was 
substantially,  as  Cullom,  the  author  of  the  first  Interstate 
Commerce  Act  declared,  "a  dead  letter."  But  Roosevelt's 
action  upon  his  opinion  awoke  the  "slumbering  conscience 
of  the  nation."  O'n  March  10,  1902,  the  National  Govern 
ment  intervened  in  the  situation  in  which  the  North 
western  States  found  themselves  at  a  disadvantage,  and 
Attorney-General  Knox,  by  direction  of  the  President, 
filed  his  petition  for  the  outlawry  of  the  Northern  Secu 
rities  Company. 

From  this  moment  a  new  economic  policy  was  taken  on. 
The  Government  intervened  to  protect  the  people  from  the 
Anti-trust  operations  of  big  business.  As  soon  as  Congress 
laws,  1903  adjourned  in  the  summer  of  1902,  Roosevelt 
went  upon  a  speaking  tour  directing  his  attention  to  those 
"great  corporations  commonly  called  trusts."  The  Outlook, 
that  knew  well  of  what  it  wrote,  declared  a  little  later  that 
the  ".peculiar  popularity  of  Theodore  Roosevelt  dates  from 
the  beginning  of  his  campaign  for  the  regulation  of  the  trusts 
in  the  summer  of  1902."  In  the  following  session  of  Congress 
three  acts  were  passed  looking  toward  the  more  effective  con 
trol  of  trusts.  The  Expedition  Act  of  February  n,  1903, 
made  it  possible  to  prosecute  with  firmness  and  quick  results. 
Federal  suits  of  this  character  were  given  precedence  on  the 
dockets  of  the  courts,  and  the  creation  of  special  trial  courts 
to  hear  Government  prosecutions  was  provided  for.  The 
Northern  Securities  Case  speedily  found  itself  in  one  of  these. 


BUSINESS  IN  POLITICS  301 

A  few  days  after  the  Expedition  Act,  the  Elkins  Anti- 
Rebate  Act  struck  at  one  of  the  most  persistent  and  perni 
cious  practices  of  the  railroads.  Many  of  the  trusts  were 
believed  to  have  gained  their  dominance  as  the  result  of 
secret  and  unfair  rebates  on  the  carriage  of  their  freight. 
The  Department  of  Commerce  and. Labor  was  created  on 
February  14,  1903,  to  provide  a  member  in  the  Cabinet 
whose  duty  it  should  be  to  watch  over  the  interests  of  the 
people  in  their  economic  relationships.  The  Commissioner 
of  Labor,  who  had  existed  for  nineteen  years  in  the  Interior 
Department,  was  brought  into  the  new  department  with 
a  going  organization.  A  new  Bureau  of  Corporations  with 
duties  to  keep  watch  over  business  was  entrusted  to  James 
R.  Garfield,  son  of  the  former  President,  while  George  B. 
Cortelyou,  who  had  risen  from  stenographer  to  Cleveland 
to  private  secretary  to  McKinley,  entered  the  Cabinet  as 
the  new  Secretary.  Cortelyou's  office,  remarked  the 
Nation,  was  the  President's  personal  department,  and  a 
governmental  field  that  was  new  and  all  his  own. 

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL  NOTE 

Charles  A.  Beard,  Contemporary  American  History  (1914),  gives  an 
effective  presentation  of  the  influence  of  business  on  politics.  F.  A.  Cleve 
land  and  F.  W.  Powell,  Railway  Promotion  and  Capitalization  in  the  United 
States  (1909),  contains  an  elaborate  bibliography.  Joseph  G.  Pyle,  Life  of 
James  J.  Hill  (1917),  is  one  of  the  best  biographies  of  a  captain  of  industry, 
and  may  be  studied  to  advantage  in  connection  with  Beckles  Willson, 
Life  of  Lord  Strathcona  and  Mount  Royal  (1915),  and  Henry  Villard,  Mem 
oirs  (1904).  H.  L.  Wilgus,  The  United  States  Steel  Corporation  in  its 
Industrial  and  Legal  Aspects  (1901),  is  a  lawyer's  analysis.  The  standard 
history  of  a  trust  is  Ida  M.  Tarbell,  History  of  the  Standard  Oil  Company 
(I903)- 


CHAPTER  XXXI 

THE  ROOSEVELT  CAMPAIGN 

• 

BEFORE  the  first  session  of  his  first  Congress  adjourned,* in 
the  summer  of  1902,  Roosevelt  had  taken  his  stand  with 
reference  to  big  business,  had  assisted  in  the  launching  of 
the  new  Cuban  Republic,  and  had  threatened  to  precipi 
tate  a  controversy  over  the  protective  tariff  because  of  his 
interest  in  reciprocity  with  Cuba. 

There  was  some  danger  that  Cuba,  independent  of  Spain, 
and  under  her  own  government,  would  be  worse  off  than  be- 
Cuban  fore  the  Spanish  War.  Spain  had  at  least  given 

reciprocity  {he  colony  a  privileged  position  in  her  own 
trade.  This  was  lost.  A  dependent  Cuba  belonging  to  the 
United  States  might  have  expected  to  share  in  the  advan 
tages  of  the  free  trade  that  was  extended  to  Porto  Rico, 
but  free  Cuba  was  a  foreign  country  outside  the  law.  Its 
Government  immediately  endeavored  to  negotiate  for  easy 
trade  relations  with  the  United  States,  and  received  the  spir 
ited  support  of  Roosevelt,  to  whom  this  was  a  matter  of 
elementary  fairness.  The  project  was  injured  in  the  public 
mind  by  the  fact  that  free  trade  in  sugar  was  welcomed  by 
the  Sugar  Trust ;  it  was  blocked  in  Congress  by  the  stubborn 
antagonism  of  the  "beet-sugar  insurgents,"  who  refused  to 
permit  a  Cuban  competition  with  their  own  domestic 
product.  There  were  also  some  members  who  were  quite 
willing  to  let  Roosevelt  learn  that  he  could  not  expect 
Congress  always  to  do  his  bidding.  In  June  the  President 
sent  in  a  vigorous  message  on  the  subject,  but  failed  to  get 
action  from  that  Congress.  Reciprocity  with  Cuba  be 
came  one  of  the  themes  which  he  took  with  him  upon  his 
speaking  trip. 

Popular  nervousness  over  the  expansion  of  the  trusts 
grew  during  the  summer  of  1902  and  was  paralleled  in  the 
Republican  Party  by  an  uneasiness  as  to  the  President's 


THE  ROOSEVELT  CAMPAIGN  303 

probable  attitude  toward  business.     But  a  greater  nervous 
ness,  steadily  increasing  during  the  summer,  had    Anthracite 
to  do  with  the  comfort  of  the  approaching  win-    c°al  strike, 
ter,  for  the  second  great  strike  of  the  anthracite 
miners  had  been  under  way  since  the  middle  of  May  and 
showed  no  prospect  of  yielding. 

The  leadership  of  John  Mitchell  in  the  strike  of  1900 
consolidated  his  power,  increased  the  influence  of  the 
United  Mine  Workers,  and  engendered  among  the  mine- 
owners  a  feeling  that  their  situation  was  in  danger.  The 
impending  contest  involved  more  than  the  conditions  of 
labor,  and  looked  toward  a  complete  recognition  of  the 
union,  but  was  met  by  an  inflexible  refusal  to  accept  the 
doctrine  of  the  "closed  shop."  There  was  no  presidential 
canvass  on  to  weaken  the  strategic  position  of  the  owners. 
'The  rights  and  interests  of  the  laboring  man,"  wrote 
George  F.  Baer,  who  became  the  chief  spokesman  of  the 
operators,  "will  be  protected  and  cared  for  —  not  by  the 
labor  agitators,  but  by  the  Christian  men  to  whom  God  in 
His  infinite  wisdom  has  given  the  control  of  the  property 
interests  of  this  country,  and  upon  the  successful  manage 
ment  of  which  so  much  depends." 

With  a  public  already  suspicious  of  big  business,  Baer's 
letter,  claiming  that  the  capitalists  were  viceroys  of  Provi 
dence,  had  a  wide  and  unexpected  circulation.  It  gave  the 
cue  for  cartoons  without  number,  and  from  it  may  be 
traced  the  growth  of  sentiment  that  made  it  possible  for  the 
President  to  make  another  advance  in  policy. 

The  strike  continued  through  the  summer  with  the 
workers  under  steady  discipline  and  with  a  minimum  of 
lawlessness  around  the  mines.  Public  sympathy  was  not 
alienated  by  misconduct  on  behalf  of  the  miners.  The 
unions  showed  a  capacity  to  hold  out  and  a  deadlock 
threatened  the  country  with  a  winter  without  coal.  On 
October  3  Roosevelt  summoned  the  presidents  of  the  coal 
companies  and  Mitchell  to  a  conference  at  the  W7hite  House. 
He  had  already  determined  that  if  the  deadlock  could  be 
broken  in  no  other  way  he  would  "send  in  the  United 


304    RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

States  Army  to  take  possession  of  the  coal  fields."  He 
had  discussed  the  details  of  this  with  General  Sconeld,  and 
intimated  his  intention  to  Senator  Quay.  It  was  a  part  of 
his  intention  to  appoint  a  commission  under  ex-President 
Cleveland  to  "decide  on  the  rights  of  the  case"  while  the 
army  got  out  the  coal.  The  White  House  conference  was 
turbulent.  The  coal  presidents  got  angry,  and  Roosevelt 
confessed  that  "he  behaved  very  badly  himself,  and  that 
Mitchell  was  the  only  one  who  kept  his  temper  and  his 
head." 

The  demand  of  the  President  was  for  an  immediate  re 
sumption  of  mining,  accompanied  by  an  examination  into 
the  merits  of  the  controversy  by  a  public  commission.  As 
the  deadlock  continued,  there  appeared  repeatedly  all  over 
the  country  angry  assertions  of  a  new  third  interest  in  the 
controversy.  The  interest  of  the  public  was  avowed  to  be 
superior  to  that  of  either  miners  or  operators.  Conserva 
tive  business  tended  to  criticize  the  President  for  forcing 
himself  into  a  struggle  in  whose  determination  he  had  no 
legal  rights.  The  great  majority,  however,  expressed  satis 
faction  at  his  intervention,  and  looked  to  Roosevelt  with 
increasing  confidence  as  the  only  agent  who  could  conserve 
the  public  interest.  On  October  13  the  operators  yielded; 
work  was  soon  resumed,  and  a  commission  was  set  to  study 
the  controversy.  The  approaching  fall  elections  found  the 
National  Administration  headed  upon  the  policy  toward 
labor  indicated  by  the  anthracite  strike,  and  the  public 
discussing  whether  or  not  the  party  had  started  upon  a 
new  career. 

Four  consecutive  Republican  Congresses  were  chosen  in 
the  four  elections  prior  to  1902.  The  Republican  Party 
Congres-  approached  the  election  of  this  year  with  con- 
sional  elec-  fidence  based  upon  its  long  tenure  of  office  and 

tion,  1902          ...  .  . 

its  perfected  party  machine,  and  faced  only 
those  doubts  that  were  indicated  by  the  effect  Roose 
velt's  new  policies  might  have  and  the  degree  to  which 
local  leaders  might  dominate  their  regions.  The  tenure 
of  the  National  Republican  organization  had  been  long 


THE  ROOSEVELT  CAMPAIGN  305 

enough  for  the  development  of  local  movements  that  now 
possessed  considerable  strength  within  the  party. 

In  Iowa,  New  York,  and  Texas  recent  movements  indi 
cated  a  popular  desire  to  break  away  from  partisan  control 
of  local  government.  New  York  City,  in  the  fall  election 
of  1901,  experienced  one  of  its  periodic  revulsions  against 
Tammany  control,  and  elected  Seth  Low  as  mayor,  at  the 
head  of  a  reform  administration.  The  prospect  of  better 
government  for  Greater  New  York,  for  the  city  had  now 
been  extended  over  the  adjacent  communities,  wras  an 
index  to  movements  of  similar  character  throughout  the 
country. 

In  Cleveland  a  violent  revulsion  in  politics  brought  Tom 
L.  Johnson  into  office  as  mayor  in  the  spring  of  1901,  on  a 
program  looking  toward  a  broadening  of  city  activities. 
Johnson  had  begun  life  in  active  business,  and  had  made 
himself  a  fortune  as  an  operator  of  street  railways.  About 
1890  he  had  a  short  period  in  Congress.  The  outstanding 
feature  in  his  intellectual  life  was  his  reading  of  Henry 
George's  Progress  and  Poverty,  and  his  conversion  to  its 
doctrines.  In  Cleveland  he  worked  for  municipal  owner 
ship  of  the  street  railways,  and  for  the  extension  of  civic 
services  as  "Golden-Rule"  Jones  had  done  in  Toledo,  and 
as  Brand  Whitlock  was  to  continue  in  Toledo  after  1906. 
The  constructive  side  of  Populism  was  struggling  to  the 
surface  in  the  spirit  of  these  men.  The  "Texas  idea,"  that 
was  just  beginning  to  take  hold,  was  advanced  by  the  great 
flood  which  left  Galveston  desolate  in  1900.  It  had  for  its 
view  the  divorce  of  municipal  government  from  politics 
through  the  substitution  of  a  commission  form  of  govern 
ment. 

The  lack  of  satisfaction  with  prevailing  political  methods 
was    closely    paralleled    by    dissatisfaction    with    political 
ideals.     The  "Iowa  idea,"  launched  in  the  Re-    The"lowa 
publican  Convention  in  that  State  in  July,  1902,    idea"  and 

1111  t  ,  the  tariff 

showed  that  the  party  could  not  expect  perma 
nent  docility  even  in  the  heart  of  its  geographical  area. 
The  Iowa  Republicans,  headed  by  Governor  Albert  B.  Cum- 


306    RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

mins,  questioned  the  wisdom  of  the  extremes  of  protection, 
and  accepted  the  dictum  that  the  tariff  was  the  mother  of 
trusts.  In  the  convention  of  1902  the  Iowa  Republicans 
demanded  a  revision  of  the  tariff  in  order  to  prevent  shel 
ter  to  monopoly,  and  approved  Roosevelt's  language  with 
reference  to  trust  control.  Roosevelt  took  the  cue  from 
this  manifestation  of  public  opinion,  and  in  his  public 
speeches  in  the  autumn  urged  a  revision  that  should  main 
tain  the  principle  of  protection  and  yet  keep  the  tariff 
schedules  flexible  so  that  they  might  be  subject  to  change 
by  the  expert  advice  of  a  non-partisan  commission,  which 
he  advocated. 

The  revolt  against  the  tariff  and  the  belief  that  the 
President  would  support  it  struck  at  the  heart  of  Republi 
can  doctrine.  The  party  was  not  pledged  to  any  course 
respecting  the  trusts,  but  the  tariff  idea  had  been  its  basic 
creed  since  the  reorganization  of  the  machine  by  Jones, 
Quay,  and  Hanra. 

On  November  4,  1902,  the  Republican  Party  elected  its 
fifth  consecutive  Congress,  but  with  a  reduced  majority. 
"The  lesson  it  teaches  to  the  Republican  Party,"  was  the 
comment  of  the  Outlook,  "is  that,  if  it  would  retain  the 
support  of  the  voters,  it  should  follow  the  President's  lead 
in  modifying  the  tariff  and  establishing  more  rigid  public 
control  of  the  operations  of  the  trusts." 

The  party  heresies  in  Iowa  produced  a  national  conse 
quence  of  much  importance.  David  B.  Henderson,  of 
Iowa,  Congressman  from  the  Dubuque  district,  announced 
in  the  summer  of  1902  that  he  would  not  be  a  candidate  to 
succeed  himself.  Since  he  was  Speaker  of  the  House  of 
Representatives,  this  meant  that  in  the  new  Congress  a 
successor  must  be  found.  He  had  succeeded  Thomas  B. 
Reed,  when  the  latter  dropped  out  in  1899,  dissatisfied  with 
his  party's  trend.  Henderson  was  identified  with  the 
movement  for  high  protection  that  Governor  Cummins 
questioned.  His  opponents  said  that  he  could  not  have 
been  renominated  had  he  desired. 

When  the  new  Congress  met  in  1903  the  lesson  of  the 


THE  ROOSEVELT  CAMPAIGN  307 

"Iowa  idea"  had  no  influence  upon  the  conduct  of  the 
Republican  majority.      Joseph  G.   Cannon,  of    joseph  G 
Illinois,   a   sturdy    Republican,   with   externals    Cannon, 

...  ,.  T  .         ,  1-1       Speaker 

reminiscent  of  the  tradition  of  Lincoln  and  with 
no  question  in  his  heart  as  to  the  merit  of  the  tariff,  was 
chosen  to  be  Speaker.  He  had  already  sat  in  fourteen 
Congresses,  and  nearly  thirty  years  previously  he  had  been 
described  as  speaking  "with  an  eloquence  that  was  un 
tutored,  but  very  effective.  ...  He  spoke  of  the  hayseed  in 
his  hair,  and  under  the  magic  touch  of  his  voice  that  hay 
seed  glowed  around  his  head  like  the  halo  of  the  martyrs." 
Before  his  first  session  as  Speaker  was  over,  the  Outlook 
commented  upon  his  "equal  mixture  of  drollery,  rugged- 
ness,  frankness,  and  common  sense,"  and  asserted  that  he 
had  "established  a  personal  relationship  with  the  members 
of  the  House  of  Representatives  quite  unique." 

The  leadership  of  Cannon  respecting  the  tariff  was  in  a 
different  direction  than  that  advised  by  President  Roose 
velt,  but  the  latter  kept  on  cordial  terms  with    Hanna  and 
"Uncle  Joe,"  the  Speaker.     The  question  of  the    the  con- 

c  .  servatives 

party  nominations  for  1904  was  arousing  com 
ment  at  the  date  of  Cannon's  election,  and  the  group  of 
Republicans  that  decried  the  influence  that  Roosevelt  was 
exerting  over  the  party  was  hopefully  casting  about  for  a 
candidate  stronger  with  the  people  and  acceptable  to  them 
selves.  This  candidate  they  found  in  Senator  Marcus 
Alonzo  Hanna. 

Mark  Hanna  was  "the  full  flower  of  the  spirit  of  com 
mercialism  in  politics."  Twenty  years  before  his  successful 
generalship  landed  McKinley  in  the  White  House  he  had 
been  identified  with  his  party  in  Ohio,  but  had  devoted 
most  of  his  attention  to  his  private  business.  After  1897  he 
became  a  public  figure.  Opposition  cartoonists  caricatured 
him  as  bloated  business,  branded  with  the  dollar  mark,  but 
before  1900  his  personal  appearance  and  his  shrewd  wisdom 
had  begun  to  contribute  to  his  reputation  as  a  statesman. 
Unused  to  public  speaking  when  he  entered  the  Senate,  he 
learned  the  trade  and  became  an  acceptable  speaker  on 


3o8     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

national  affairs.  Everywhere  he  went  he  gained  the  posi 
tive  interest  of  conservative  society,  and  lessened  the  hos 
tility  of  others.  His  intervention*  in  the  coal  strike  of 
1900  left  him  with  a  genuine  interest  in  the  problems  of 
labor,  to  which  his  active  membership  in  the  new  National 
Civic  Federation  soon  bore  witness.  Before  the  death  of 
McKinley  Southern  Republicans  had  begun  to  talk  of  him 
as  a  conservative  Republican  candidate  for  1904. 

Hanna  was  never  really  a  candidate  for  the  nomination, 
but  did  not  effectually  withdraw  his  name  from  discussion. 
He  allowed  the  uncertainty  as  to  his  intentions  to  worry 
Roosevelt,  who  was  frankly  a  candidate  for  renomination 
to  succeed  himself.  Even  if  there  had  been  ambitions, 
Hanna  knew  they  could  not  be  realized  because  of  an 
incurable  disease.  He  died  on  February  15,  1904,  bringing 
to  an  end  all  of  the  hopes  that  stirred  among  those  who 
desired  to  elect  some  other  President  than  Roosevelt.  ,Other 
than  Hanna  there  was  no  possible  competitor  for  the  Re 
publican  nomination. 

Between  the  death  of  Hanna  and  the  opening  of  the  Re 

publican  Convention  on  June  21,  most  of  the  evidences  of 

party   difference   were   eliminated.      The   con- 

The  Repub-  .        ,  ,     .  ,       _ 

licans  nom-     servative  leaders  gave  their  support  to  the  Presi- 


dent,  to  Root  for  temporary  chairman,  and  to 
Cannon  for  permanent  chairman.  Jacob  Riis 
published  in  serial  form  his  laudatory  biography,  Theodore 
Roosevelt  the  Citizen;  Francis  E.  Leupp  brought  out  The  Man 
Roosevelt.  The  conservatives  accepted  Roosevelt,  the  rank 
and  file  of  the  party  acclaimed  him,  and  he  himself  paid  the 
price  by  postponing  his  demands  for  revision  of  the  tariff 
and  for  other  unsettling  policies. 

The  conservative  decision  of  the  President  was  made  clear 
by  the  treatment  of  Wisconsin  Republicans  at  the  conven 
tion.  In  Wisconsin,  like  Iowa,  there  had  been  uneasiness 
at  organization  control.  Robert  M.  La  Follette,  after 
three  terms  in  Congress,  had  advanced  his  claim  to  be  gov 
ernor  on  a  platform  of  tax  reform,  direct  primaries,  and 
corporation  control.  In  1896  and  again  in  1898  he  was 


THE  ROOSEVELT  CAMPAIGN  309 

beaten  at  the  Republican  Convention.  In  1900  he  gained 
the  nomination  and  was  elected  governor  for  the  first  of 
three  terms. 

The  Wisconsin  legislation  between  1900  and  1905  laid 
the  foundations  of  the  "Wisconsin  idea,"  beginning  with 
primary  legislation  and  railway  control.  As  a  "champion 
of  the  people's  rights,"  Governor  La  Follette  desired  to 
head  the  Wisconsin  delegation  to  the  Republican  Conven 
tion.  A  bolting  Republican  State  Convention  selected  a 
different  delegation,  dominated  by  the  two  Senators  from 
the  State,  and  Henry  C.  Payne,  who  was  Roosevelt's  Post 
master-General.  The  Republican  National  Convention  ex 
cluded  the  regular  delegation  and  seated  the  conservative 
bolting  group.  After  1904  it  was  always  possible  for  critics 
of  President  Roosevelt  to  use  this  discrimination  against  a 
reform  Republican  as  evidence  of  political  insincerity. 

The  Republican  ticket  was  completed  by  the  nomination 
of  Charles  W.  Fairbanks  for  Vice-President,  and  the  selec 
tion  of  George  B.  Cortelyou  as  chairman  of  the  Republican 
National  Committee. 

The  Democratic  Convention  at  St.  Louis  had  no  clear 
candidate  or  issue.     The  new  policies  of  President  Roosevelt 
had  attracted  the  interest  of  many  voters  who    Alton  B 
had  supported  Bryan  in  the  last  two  campaigns.    Parker  the 

J  Democratic 

Bryan  himself  was  not  a  candidate,  but  stood  nominee, 
outside  the  ring  to  let  the  convention  do  its  best  I9°4 
without  him.  Populism  had  ceased  to  be  a  vital  force. 
The  middle-of-the-road  Populists  held  a  national  conven 
tion  that  emphasized  their  unimportance.  The  Democratic 
Convention  heeded  neither  the  Populists'  appeals  for  the 
observance  of  their  ancient  faith  nor  the  journalistic  efforts 
of  William  Randolph  Hearst  to  secure  the  nomination  for 
himself.  The  final  selection  was  Judge  Alton  B.  Parker, 
of  New  York,  whose  earlier  political  affiliations  had  been 
with  the  faction  of  David  B.  Hill.  Some  regarded  his 
nomination  as  the  end  of  Democratic  rule  by  "a  minority 
who  were  enslaved  while  in  a  hypnotic  trance."  This  im 
pression  was  strengthened  by  a  sensational  telegram  to  the 


3io    RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

convention,  in  which  Judge  Parker  notified  his  party  of  his 
repudiation  of  the  Bryan  doctrine  of  free  silver.  The  politi 
cal  depression  of  the  Democrats  ts  indicated  by  the  fact 
that  some  of  them  talked  seriously  of  a  fourth  nomination 
of  Grover  Cleveland,  as  the  only  person  who  could  beat 
Roosevelt. 

The  struggle  for  the  votes  in  1904  was  one-sided  in  that 
the  personality  of  Judge  Parker  was  no  match  for  that 
of  President  Roosevelt.  The  Democratic  Party  had  no 
principles  that  were  not  more  attractively  stated  in  either 
the  Republican  platform  or  the  speeches  of  the  President, 
and  the  country  was  still  rioting  in  the  prosperity  that  had 
dominated  the  preceding  campaign.  Not  until  the  last  of 
the  canvass  did  any  matter  of  genuine  interest  appear. 
Then  came  an  episode,  as  a  consequence  of  which,  says  John 
Hay,  Judge  Parker  "was  called  a  liar,  and  a  malignant  liar, 
and  a  knowing  and  conscious  liar,"  by  the  President. 

The  issue  involved  had  been  hinted  at  by  Democratic 
speakers  throughout  the  canvass.  They  had  complained 
that  Cortelyou,  Roosevelt's  campaign  manager,  had  as 
Campaign  Secretary  of  Commerce  and  Labor  been  in  a 
funds  position  through  his  Bureau  of  Corporations  to 

examine  the  private  accounts  of  big  business.  They  charged 
that  the  great  corporations  were  giving  freely  to  the  Repub 
lican  campaign  fund,  and  they  insinuated  as  directly  as  they 
dared  that  in  this  connection  there  was  an  opportunity 
for  possible  blackmail.  On  the  last  day  of  October  Judge 
Parker,  speaking  in  Madison  Square  Garden,  denounced 
Cortelyou's  campaign  fund  as  a  scandal  and  repeated  the 
insinuation  as  to  his  methods.  To  this  President  Roosevelt 
replied  in  a  resounding  and  indignant  denial  of  the  fact 
and  the  inference.  Whether  the  Democratic  inference  of 
blackmail  was  correct  or  not,  the  fact  was  that  great  cor 
porations,  following  their  usual  practice,  had  made  large 
gifts.  George  W.  Perkins  soon  admitted  making  a  contri 
bution  of  nearly  fifty  thousand  dollars  on  behalf  of  the 
New  York  Life  Insurance  Company,  and  other  contributions 
were  subsequently  brought  to  light  in  the  Senate  investiga- 


THE  ROOSEVELT  CAMPAIGN  311 

tion  of  1912.  In  1907  Congress  forbade  any  federal  corpora 
tion  to  contribute  to  any  campaign  fund,  and  any  corpo 
ration  to  contribute  toward  the  election  of  a  President,  a 
Senator,  or  a  Representative. 

The  attack  of  Judge  Parker  created  a  ripple  of  interest, 
but  was  more  than  offset,  for  the  time  being,  by  Roose 
velt's  denial  and  his  appeal  to  "all  men  of  common  sense" 
and  "all  honest  men."  No  President  had  ever  received  so 
large  a  majority  as  Roosevelt  did  in  1904.  Eugene  V.  Debs, 
the  Socialist  candidate,  ran  third  with  six  hundred  thousand 
votes. 

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL  NOTE 

The  works  listed  under  Chapter  XXX  are  useful  here  also.  Herbert 
Croly,  Marcus  Alonzo  Hanna  (1912),  is  a  vivid  historical  reconstruction, 
considering  that  Hanna  left  almost  no  collected  papers.  The  Wisconsin 
movement  may  be  watched  in  Robert  M.  La  Follette,  Autobiography  (1913). 
Joseph  G.  Cannon  is  now  (1920)  publishing  chapters  of  his  own  autobiog 
raphy.  J.  L.  Laughlin  and  H.  P.  Willis,  Reciprocity  (1903),  contains 
materials  on  the  Cuban  problem. 


CHAPTER  XXXII 

MUCKRAKING  AND  THE  NEW  STANDARDS 

THE  attack  upon  big  business  directed  by  Roosevelt  in 
1902  and  1903  was  the  first  and  the  heaviest  of  the  shocks 
Public  that  destroyed  the  complacency  of  the  American 

opinion  and  spirit  and  introduced  a  period  of  suspicion  and 
distrust.  The  America  of  the  nineties  was  im 
pregnated  with  what  some  critics  described  as  gross  mate 
rialism.  The  history  of  the  nation  had  seen  the  rewards  of 
life  fall  to  the  individual  with  spirit  and  ingenuity.  The 
frontier  ideal  had  everywhere  prevailed,  and  had  gloried  in 
the  successful  surmounting  of  obstacles.  The  road  from 
the  log  cabin  to  the  White  House  had  been  traveled  more 
than  once,  and  the  other  road  that  led  to  wealth  and  busi 
ness  influence  was  beaten  broad  and  smooth.  Public  opin 
ion  looked  upon  the  successful  man  as  a  desirable  asset  in 
society.  Individuals  looked  forward  to  success  for  them 
selves  as  a  reasonable  expectation,  and  the  resulting  popular 
confidence  in  personal  achievement  produced  a  spirit  of 
complacency  in  the  presence  of  material  comfort.  The  in 
spiring  careers  of  the  captains  of  the  industrial  develop 
ment  lost  much  of  their  luster  as  the  spirit  got  abroad  that 
business  was  corrupt,  and  that  success  was  often  founded 
upon  unfair  practices. 

Before  the  mechanism  for  the  control  of  trusts  could  be 
created,  the  public  had  to  be  shown  that  the  trusts  were  bad 
enough  to  need  control.  Criminal  prosecutions  and  public 
attacks  directed  from  the  seats  of  the  mighty  helped  to 
accomplish  this.  The  period  of  suspicion  was  hastened  by 
the  advent  of  a  literature  of  exposure  that  dragged  unsightly 
practices  from  the  seclusion  of  private  business  and  invested 
them  with  a  public  interest.  It  was  a  short  step  for  public 
opinion,  from  its  stand  that  the  trust  must  obey  the  law, 
to  its  new  stand  that,  in  a  great  strike,  the  interests  of  the 


MUCKRAKING  AND  THE  NEW  STANDARDS    313 

direct  combatants  are  less  than  those  of  the  general  public; 
and  from  this  to  its  new  position  that  all  business  that 
affects  the  public  is  the  public's  business. 

The  Roosevelt  Administration  witnessed  the  develop 
ment  of  the  literature  of  exposure  as  it  passed  from  sensa 
tion  to  sensation,  and  ended  in  a  riot  among  the  unsightly 
facts  that  suggested  the  name  of  "muckraking"  to  cover 
the  process.  It  beheld  as  well  an  improvement  in  standards 
of  taste  and  a  broadening  of  appreciation  in  literature  and 
art.  It  saw  also  a  revival  of  interest  in  education  and  in  the 
sciences  that  bear  upon  the  facts  of  life.  The  practice  of 
government  began  to  change,  under  the  influence  of  non- 
political  experts  whose  decisions  were  more  and  more  based 
upon  scholarly  judgments,  and  whose  number  increased  with 
each  new  function  of  supervision  assumed  by  the  United 
States. 

A  new  national  journalism  was  the  vehicle  of  the  muck- 
rakers.  The  American  newspaper  passed  through  one  stage 
in  its  development  with  the  group  of  great  edi-  New  types 
tors  that  arose  after  the  Civil  War  —  Greeley  ?f  journal- 
and  Reid,  Bowles,  Halstead,  Horace  White,  and 
Henry  \Vatterson.  The  vogue  of  the  personal  editors 
weakened  in  the  eighties  as  new  habits  in  advertising  and 
new  methods  of  handling  news  through  the  press  associa 
tions  threw  their  influence  in  favor  of  local  and  colorless 
journalism  founded  upon  the  interests  of  the  business  of 
fice.  In  the  nineties  no  American  journal  had  an  influence 
such  as  Horace  Greeley  exerted  for  a  generation  with  his 
weekly  Tribune.  The  new  journals  of  local  gossip  founded 
by  Hearst  and  his  imitators  substituted  thrill  and  flavor  for 
influence  and  sound  knowledge,  and  did  little  to  help  in  the 
formation  of  an  enlightened  public  opinion. 

The  mechanical  devices  of  the  printing  trade  made 
possible  new  results  in  the  printing  of  periodicals.  The 
half-tone  process  and  the  zinc  etching  made  their  appear 
ance  in  the  eighties,  followed  by  illustration  on  a  scale  of 
accuracy  and  beauty  hitherto  unknown.  The  improve 
ments  in  transportation  widened  the  range  and  ease  of 


314     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

distribution,  and  prepared  the  way  for  a  type  of  journalism 
that  was  represented  by  McClure' s  Magazine,  in  1893. 

The  story  of  the  ten-cent  magazines  has  to  do  with  the 
widening  of  interest  in  forms  of  literature  higher  than  the 
The  ten-  daily  press.  The  old  literary  magazines  kept  to 
cent  their  policy  and  their  higher  prices  in  spite  of 

the  new  competition.  The  Atlantic,  Harper's 
Monthly,  Century,  and  Scribner's  Magazine  had  established 
definite  reputations  before  S.  S.  McClure  organized  the  new 
invasion  of  the  field.  McClure' s  Monthly,  Munsey's,  and 
The  Cosmopolitan  were  the  chief  members  of  the  new  pe 
riodical  group  that  reached  out  for  the  news-stand  trade  at 
a  nominal  price,  and  that  sought  for  literary  wares  of  in 
terest  to  the  new  clientele. 

The  limitations  of  this  clientele  are  discussed  in  the 
autobiography  of  S.  S.  McClure.  The  range  included  the 
great  middle  class  capable  of  larger  interests  than  the 
ephemeral  daily  press  could  satisfy,  yet  not  up  to  as  high 
standards  as  the  readers  of  the  Atlantic  and  Harper's.  The 
Century  Magazine  had  come  in  contact  with  this  class  to  its 
great  financial  profit  when  in  the  eighties  it  ran  its  two 
serials,  the  "Biography  of  Lincoln,"  by  Nicolay  and  Hay, 
and  the  "Battles  and  Leaders  of  the  Civil  War,"  by  the 
leaders  themselves.  The  new  cheap  magazines  made 
deliberate  search  for  articles  that  should  be  universal  in 
their  appeal,  and  hence  marketable  over  the  whole  country. 
They  needed  also  to  be  obvious  in  their  significance,  for  the 
profits  of  the  business  depended  upon  reaching  a  public 
unaccustomed  to  serious  reading.  A  thrill  of  some  sort  was 
indispensable.  The  yellow  journals  were  already  flourish 
ing  upon  the  appetite  of  society  for  exciting  news.  The 
ideal  material  for  the  new  periodicals  combined  universality 
with  obvious  clearness,  and  some  of  the  element  that  came 
to  be  known  as  "punch." 

McClure  was  the  leader  among  the  new  periodical  jour- 
Ida  M.  nalists  and  early  in  his  career  discovered  the 
Tarbell  greatest  of  his  co-editors,  Ida  M.  Tarbell.  Two 
serials  by  this  young  historian,  covering  the  lives  of  Lincoln 


MUCKRAKING  AND  THE  NEW  STANDARDS    315 

and  Napoleon,  exploited  the  growing  interest  in  Lincoln's 
democracy  and  in  the  centennial  of  Bonaparte.  McClure 
sensed  immediately  the  fact  that  business  contained  the 
themes  for  stories  once  the  attention  of  the  public  was  di 
rected  to  the  conduct  of  business.  In  1903  Miss  Tarbell 
began  to  publish  in  McClure  s  Magazine  her  "  History  of 
the  Standard  Oil  Company,"  which  was  documented  and 
criticized  as  a  sound  piece  of  historical  investigation,  and 
which  proved  to  lay  the  foundation  for  a  new  period  of 
national  thought.  It  began  in  a  serious  way  the  literature 
of  exposure. 

From  making  serious  studies  in  the  habits  of  business  to 
muckraking  for  the  sake  of  the  muck  carried  the  new  jour 
nalism  through  a  period  of  four  years.  The  little  group 
of  monthlies,  supplemented  by  Collier's  Weekly,  did  the 
burden  of  pioneer  work  in  responsible  exposure.  They 
commonly  safeguarded  themselves  before  publication  by 
accumulating  evidence  that  might  be  an  adequate  defense 
if  their  victims  brought  suit  for  libel,  but  their  trail  was 
followed  by  irresponsible  sensation-mongers  attracted  only 
by  the  thrills  of  exposure  and  the  profits  of  huge  circula 
tion.  Among  the  most  prominent  of  the  products  of  the 
new  literature  were  Lincoln  Steffens's  Shame  of  the  Cities, 
Thomas  Lawson's  Frenzied  Finance,  and  the  revelations  on 
patent  medicine  and  its  advertising  that  Collier's  Weekly 
published. 

Fiction  was  brought  into  the  ranks  to  serve  the  muck- 
rakers.  Cut-throat  speculation  furnished  the  theme  for 
Frank  Norris's  Octopus  (1901);  the  offenses  of  the  meat- 
packers  inspired  Upton  Sinclair's  Jungle  (1906),  while  the 
political  intrigues  of  railroads  and  big  business  were  used 
by  Winston  Churchill  in  Coniston  (1906). 

Exposure  was  both  useful  and  profitable  while  it  main 
tained  its  connection  with  reality.      As  the  months  went 
on  much  of  it  became  irresponsible,  and  at  once    Literature 
created  among  its  readers  a  desire  for  excitement    of  exP°sure 
and  highly  seasoned  news,  and  destroyed  the  good  balance 
of  their  judgment.     The  worship  of  success  with  which  the 


3i6     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

critics  had  reproached  American  opinion  in  the  nineties  was 
transmuted  into  suspicion  and  social  hatred.  Epithets 
came  to  be  substituted  for  cortstructive  analysis,  and 
Roosevelt  had  not  got  far  into  his  second  term  before  muck 
raking  had  become  an  obstruction  to  reform  instead  of 
its  ally.  In  April,  1906,  having  occasion  to  deliver  an 
address  at  the  corner-stone  laying  of  the  new  office  building 
for  the  House  of  Representatives,  the  President  sought  to 
call  a  halt  in  the  movement  that  he  himself  had  so  greatly 
stimulated.  He  pointed  out  what  John  Bunyan  had  known 
when  he  used  the  phrase,  that  muck  is  of  use  only  when  it 
serves  to  fertilize  the  land  —  not  when  it  is  gathered  for  its 
own  sake.  The  time  had  come,  he  declared,  to  turn  to  con 
structive  work  to  remedy  the  evils  that  had  been  exposed. 
The  reality  of  these  evils  was  too  true  to  be  denied.  Charles 
E.  Hughes  found  them  permeating  the  business  of  insur 
ance;  Joseph  W.  Folk  uncovered  them  in  the  Middle  West; 
Garfield  in  his  public  office  showed  the  unfair  practices  that 
prevailed  in  the  transportation  of  petroleum.  ''What  we 
have  been  witnessing,"  declared  the  venerable  Washington 
Gladden,  "is  a  new  Apocalypse,  an  uncovering  of  the  ini 
quity  of  the  land.  .  .  .  We  have  found  that  no  society  can 
marati  hellward  faster  than  a  democracy  under  the  ban 
ner  of  unbridled  individualism." 

American  literary  taste  and  appreciation,  distorted  by 

the  one-sided  activities  of  the  muckrakers,  was  nevertheless 

surer  of  itself  in  the  twentieth  century  than  it 

and  a  had  been  two  decades  earlier.      No  European 

dramatic        visitor  could  start  as  wide  a  ripple  of  irritation 

standards 

or  self-examination  in  1905  as  Matthew  Arnold 
and  James  Bryce  did  in  their  day.  The  correspondence 
of  President  Roosevelt  with  Sir  George  Otto  Trevelyan, 
the  historian  of  the  American  Revolution,  reveals  the  de 
gree  to  which  the  best  of  the  English  had  come  to  under 
stand  America;  while  America  took  itself  as  an  established 
fact,  and  a  growing  number  of  Americans  lived  in  the  intel 
lectual  currents  of  the  whole  world,  accepting  and  valu 
ing  ideals  without  much  reference  to  their  origin.  It  was 


MUCKRAKING  AND  THE  NEW  STANDARDS    317 

still  possible  for  a  foreigner,  like  Maxim  Gorky,  to  weaken 
his  standing  in  an  instant  by  a  departure  from  the  accepted 
American  code  of  morals;  but  where  he  failed  a  hundred 
others  succeeded  in  gaining  the  approval  of  the  country. 

Ellen  Terry  and  Sir  Henry  Irving  were  for  a  generation 
living  evidence  of  the  standard  taste  that  disregarded  the 
Atlantic  Ocean.  From  his  first  appearance  in  America  in 
1883  until  the  end  of  the  century,  he,  or  they  —  for  they 
frequently  appeared  together  —  found  unvarying  popu 
larity  for  their  presentations  of  romantic  drama.  Irving 
found  Edwin  Booth  at  the  top  of  his  career  when  he  first 
appeared,  Joseph  Jefferson  already  well  established  as 
"Bob  Acres"  and  "Rip  Van  Winkle,"  Richard  Mansfield 
just  starting  a  long  career  with  a  success  in  A  Parisian 
Romance,  the  younger  Sothern  taking  over  some  of  his 
father's  glory,  and  Denman  Thompson  reaching  the  middle 
tones  of  American  life  in  the  perennial  Old  Homestead. 
Year  after  year,  as  Irving  and  Terry  returned  to  the  Ameri 
can  theaters  in  their  Shakespearean  revivals,  they  found 
the  personnel  changing  and  the  standard  rising.  It  ceased 
to  be  true,  as  Henry  Ward  Beecher  once  suggested,  that 
"the  only  amusements  tolerated  by  the  American  Church 
were  Banking  and  the  Currency."  John  Drew,  l^at  C. 
Goodwin,  and  Francis  Wilson  established  themselves  in 
their  fields  of  social  comedy  and  farce,  while  Julia  Marlowe, 
Maude  Adams,  and  Ethel  Barrymore  brought  charm  and 
delicacy  into  a  profession  that  had  long  needed  it. 

Edwin  Booth  died  in  1893,  after  having  turned  his  home 
and  much  of  his  fortune  over  to  his  profession,  in  the  form 
of  the  Players'  Club,  which  he  founded  in  New    Vaudeville 
York.     For  a  decade  more  Joseph  Jefferson  took    and  the  ^ 
his  place  as  dean  of  the  American  stage,  yielding 
the  position  on  his  death  to  Edward  H.  Sothern  and  Julia 
Marlowe.     By  the  end  of  the  first  decade  of  the  new  cen 
tury,  while  taste  was  becoming  standardized  throughout 
the  English-speaking  world,  the  rivals  of  the  old  drama  were 
forcing  doubts  as  to  its  survival.     In  the  lighter  forms  the 
pageantry  of  the  old  Black  Crook,  that  ran  for  a  generation 


318     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

as  a  New  York  recreation  for  country  visitors,  yielded  to 
vaudeville  and  musical  comedy.  The  melodious  enter 
tainment  of  comic  opera,  whose  Pinafore  and  Mikado  set 
the  eighties  to  humming  tunes,  suffered  with  the  drama. 
Lottie  Collins,  with  her  noisy  Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay,  and 
Anna  Held  and  Yvette  Guilbert,  with  their  foreign  accent 
and  their  songs  of  shady  suggestion,  brought  the  standards 
of  the  European  music-halls  to  America  in  the  nineties. 
The  moving  pictures  began  in  the  next  decade  to  cheapen 
dramatic  art  and  to  popularize  its  substitutes. 

The  historian  of  the  drama  might  perhaps  show  that  the 
amount  of  interest  in  the  highest  forms  of  theatrical  art 
Music  and  steadily  increased,  but  seemed  proportionately 
opera  jess  Decause  of  the  multitude  of  cheap  and  in 

ferior  productions  that  grew  even  more  rapidly  as  city 
populations  with  money  to  spend  became  more  dense  and 
numerous.  The  best  acting  was,  perhaps,  not  declining 
below  the  standard  of  the  Booths;  musical  appreciation  was 
being  created  and  improved  on  every  hand.  The  work  of 
Theodore  Thomas  laid  the  foundations  of  American  music 
in  the  East  in  the  seventies  and  in  the  West  in  the  eighties. 
His  orchestra  in  Chicago  made  that  city  a  musical  center 
after  the  World's  Fair;  while  the  Boston  Symphony  Or 
chestra,  under  the  persistent  patronage  of  Major  Henry 
L.  Higginson,  maintained  standards  creditable  anywhere. 
In  the  city  amusement  parks,  gaining  rapidly  in  popularity 
as  electric  transportation  made  it  possible  to  reach  them, 
music  found  additional  patrons,  and  orchestras  and  bands 
multiplied.  John  Philip  Sousa  and  Walter  Damrosch 
helped  to  increase  the  popular  understanding  of  good  music. 
The  father  of  the  latter,  Leopold  Damrosch,  was  one  of 
the  early  pioneers  in  the  task. 

Grand  opera  became  fashionable  before  it  became  popu 
lar  in  the  United  States.  The  opening  of  Henry  E.  Abbey's 
Metropolitan  Opera  House  in  New  York  in  1883  was  one 
of  the  early  landmarks  in  its  development,  and  coincided 
within  a  few  months  with  the  first  presentation  of  Wag 
ner's  Parsifal  at  Bayreuth.  Thomas  and  Damrosch  were 


MUCKRAKING  AND  THE  NEW  STANDARDS    319 

already  playing  most  of  the  Wagnerian  scores  in  their  con 
certs  before  the  importation  of  foreign  singers  made  their 
operatic  production  practicable  in  the  United  States.  It 
was  a  long  distance  from  Barnum's  exploitation  of  Jenny 
Lind,  in  1850,  to  the  grand  opera  season  in  New  York  in 
the  nineties,  with  its  huge  subscription  list  and  its  display  of 
millinery.  The  extension  of  the  capacity  to  appreciate  the 
best  in  music  moved  more  rapidly  in  the  next  two  decades 
as  the  phonograph  in  its  various  forms  carried  musical 
education  far  beyond  the  widest  of  the  concert  audiences. 
The  operatic  singers  found  the  profits  of  their  profession 
vastly  increased  by  the  clientele  created  by  the  phonograph. 

By  the  side  of  the  broadening  taste  in  matters  of  artistic 
appreciation  there  was  a  broadening  of  the  religious  spirit 
in  America.  The  Church  in  the  twentieth  cen-  Reugious 
tury  seemed  to  be  developing  its  social  implica-  and  social 
tions  and  subordinating  its  doctrinal.  There 
were  no  conceded  leaders  of  the  relative  eminence  of  Phil 
lips  Brooks  or  Henry  Ward  Beecher,  whose  churches  were 
almost  national  monuments  twenty  years  earlier.  The 
emotional  side  of  religion  that  had  been  represented  by 
Moody  and  Sankey  was  continued  by  Billy  Sunday  and  his 
imitators.  But  religious  thought,  in  the  pulpit  and  outside 
it,  had  come  under  the  influence  of  science  and  sociology. 
Inter-denominational  respect  and  tolerance  had  succeeded 
theological  bickering.  The  institutional  church  was  an 
accomplished  fact,  and  derived  powerful  support  from  non- 
sectarian  bodies  like  the  Young  Men's  Christian  Association 
and  the  Young  Women's  Christian  Association.  Heresy 
trials  became  so  rare  as  to  appear  anomalous,  and  church 
papers  generally  lost  both  acidity  and  colorless  piety, 
while  some,  like  the  Independent  and  the  Christian  Union, 
branched  out  into  broader  journalism.  A  growing  zeal 
for  social  service  gave  strength  to  the  movement  for  politi 
cal  reform. 

The  indignation  at  the  trend  of  business,  upon  which  the 
muckrakers  fattened,  coincided  with  a  new  feeling  of  re 
sponsibility  for  the  public  welfare  on  behalf  of  the  very 


320     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

offenders  who  were  denounced.  Both  John  D.  Rockefeller 
and  Andrew  Carnegie  became  notable  leaders  in  the  en 
couragement  of  new  movements  in»education,  while  a  mul 
titude  of  other  benefactors  enlarged  the  endowments  of 
universities  and  colleges. 

For  Andrew  Carnegie  the  flotation  of  the  United  States 
Steel  Corporation  marked  a  transition  from  captain  of  in- 
The  Car-  dustry  to  sage  and  benefactor.  He  was  already 
negiebenev-  identified  with  an  educational  movement  which 
showed  itself  in  the  raising  of  a  multitude  of 
libraries  bearing  his  name.  In  January,  1902,  he  turned 
over  a  clear  gift  of  ten  million  dollars  to  the  Carnegie  Insti 
tution  of  Washington  for  the  encouragement  of  research. 
There  had  been  a  question  in  his  mind  as  to  whether  he 
should  create  a  new  institution  as  Johns  Hopkins  did,  or 
revivify  an  old  one,  as  Rockefeller  did  with  the  University 
of  Chicago.  The  final  decision,  in  which  Daniel  C.  Gilman 
had  a  large  share,  was  to  create  an  institution  to  advance 
those  aspects  of  research  that  found  difficulty  in  being 
cultivated  in  existing  institutions.  The  scientific  bureaus 
organized  in  the  Carnegie  Institution  were  soon  at  work 
upon  a  range  of  studies  that  spread  from  European  sources 
for  the  history  of  the  United  States  to  the  deflection  of  the 
needle  toward  the  magnetic  pole. 

In  1905  Carnegie  set  aside  a  second  fund  to  be  admin 
istered  for  the  improvement  of  teaching  by  the  Carnegie 
Foundation.  A  system  of  professorial  pensions  and  re 
tiring  allowances  was  brought  into  existence  by  this  means. 
A  little  later  he  created  a  Carnegie  Endowment  for  Inter 
national  Peace,  and  before  he  died,  in  1919,  he  had  ap 
proached  his  ambition  to  die  poor  by  consecrating  the  great 
bulk  of  his  wealth  to  the  Carnegie  Corporation  (1911)  with 
a  mandate  to  keep  his  other  endowments  supplied  with 
funds. 

The  Southern  Education  Board,  created  in  1901  with 
Robert  C.  Ogden  as  its  guiding  spirit,  was  an  outgrowth  of 
the  Northern  interest  in  Southern  education  already  ex 
pressed  in  the  Peabody  and  Slater  funds.  In  1903  the  Gen- 


MUCKRAKING  AND  THE  NEW  STANDARDS    321 

eral  Education  Board  was  incorporated  on  the  initiative 
of  the  Rockefellers  to  assist  by  encouragement    The 
and   gift  in  the  development  of  education   by    Rockefeller 

rr^i      T~»  •  /  \      Foundation 

private  means.  The  Rockefeller  Institute  (1901) 
devoted  itself  to  the  laboratory  study  of  medical  problems, 
and  the  Rockefeller  Foundation  (1913)  drew  to  itself  in 
1917  one  of  the  most  inspiring  of  the  University  presidents, 
George  E.  Vincent,  to  develop  its  universal  campaign  for 
social  betterment. 

The  new  university  presidents  of  the  first  decade  of  the 
twentieth  century  gave  evidence  to  the  growing  determin 
ation  that  higher  education  should  solve  the  Educational 
specific  problems.  A  great  scientist  at  Johns  trend 
Hopkins,  Ira  Remsen  (1902),  continued  the  tradition  of 
pure  research  that  Gilman  had  established.  At  Columbia 
University,  Nicholas  Murray  Butler  (1902)  turned  his  broad 
humanitarian  culture  to  the  service  of  education.  At  Wis 
consin  Charles  Richard  Van  Rise  (1903)  came  as  a  great 
economic  geologist  to  help  solve  the  problems  on  the  border 
line  of  government  and  science.  At  Princeton  a  layman, 
Woodrow  Wilson  (1902),  took  up  the  burden  for  the  culti 
vation  of  democratic  ideals.  "  I  have  studied  the  history  of 
America,"  he  said  in  his  inaugural;  "I  have  seen  her  grow 
great  in  the  paths  of  liberty  and  of  progress  by  following 
after  great  ideals.  Every  concrete  thing  that  she  has  done 
has  seemed  to  rise  out  of  some  abstract  principle,  some  vi 
sion  of  the  mind.  The  greatest  victories  have  been  the 
victories  of  peace  [and]  of  humanity." 

In  the  mind  of  the  muc]|raker  the  injustices  of  the  eco 
nomic  system  were  ascribable  to  the  unrestrained  cupidity 
and  criminal  designs  of  wealth.  The  point  of  view  was  not 
far  different  from  that  of  organized  socialism  that  put  its 
first  presidential  ticket  in  the  field  in  1900,  and  endeavored 
thereafter  to  show  that  capitalism  lay  at  the  root  of  all 
evil.  It  is  not  necessary  for  the  historian  to  accept  this  easy 
diagnosis  of  the  conditions  that  were  revealed  by  inves 
tigations  and  prosecutions.  Government  was  undergoing  a 
change  in  both  its  purpose  and  method,  and  it  would  have 


322    RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

been  difficult,  with  the  best  and  most  conscientious  of  in 
tentions,  to  have  avoided  much  of  the  injustice  that  ac 
companied  the  industrial  revolution. 

Steadily  since  the  close  of  the  Civil  War  the  business  of 
government  —  city,  state,  or  national  —  had  increased  in 
volume  and  in  scope.  One  after  another  the  people  en 
trusted  to  their  representatives  tasks  they  had  formerly 
performed  themselves,  like  water  supply  and  drainage,  as 
well  as  tasks  that  had  gone  unperformed  in  the  earlier 
stages  of  American  organization,  like  food  inspection  and 
reclamation.  Not  until  1883  was  the  principle  definitely 
accepted  that  the  tenure  of  public  office  by  the  civil  servant 
must  be  connected  with  capacity  and  a  proper  fulfillment  of 
duties.  The  amount  of  work  to  be  done  steadily  increased, 
while  the  technical  portion  of  it  became  every  year  a  larger 
part  of  the  whole. 

With  the  approval  of  the  people  Government  entered  into 
a  field  in  which  decisions  could  not  be  reached  by  political 
Specialists  argument,  and  in  which  proper  action  could 
in  Govern-  be  based  only  upon  technical  skill.  The  con 
clusions  of  the  bacteriologists  and  the  plant 
pathologists  in  the  Government  service  could  have  no  con 
nection  with  practical  politics,  yet  all  American  legislative 
bodies  in  the  nineteenth  century  were  organized  chiefly  for 
the  purpose  of  reaching  political  decisions.  Before  Govern 
ment  could  readjust  itself  to  the  new  idea  that  made  it  the 
protector  of  individual  liberty  and  opportunity,  it  was  nec 
essary  to  devise  new  methods  in  legislation  in  order  to  make 
it  possible  for  political  legislatures  to  direct  scientific  or 
technical  operations. 

Congress  and  the  legislatures  gradually  and  almost  un 
consciously  changed  their  habits.  The  public  debate  be 
came  less  important  than  the  committee  hearing.  Before 
the  committees,  experts  in  the  various  fields  of  government 
made  their  appearance  to  explain  the  reasonableness  of  the 
programs  that  were  recommended.  These  programs  in  in 
creasing  degree  depended  upon  the  integrity  of  the  scholar 
ship  of  expert  civil  servants.  The  process  was  under  way 


MUCKRAKING  AND  THE  NEW  STANDARDS     323 

during  the  muckraking  epoch,  but  both  legislators  and  ex 
perts  had  much  to  learn  before  the  final  position  of  both  in 
the  new  scheme  could  be  established.  A  clean  heart  and 
a  love  for  the  people  was  not  an  adequate  preparation  for 
regulating  the  railroads,  nor  was  the  most  expert  scientific 
attainment  a  guarantee  of  wisdom  in  the  direction  of  public 
policy.  The  germ  of  the  British  Parliament,  the  mother  of 
American  legislatures,  was  provided  in  ancient  local  finan 
cial  juries  that  heard  testimony  and  rendered  verdicts. 
History  was  in  a  way  repeating  itself  as  the  twentieth-cen 
tury  legislatures  learned  to  sit  in  judgment  over  the  techni 
cal  plans  brought  up  to  them  from  the  administrative  de 
partments  of  government.  What  the  muckraker  ascribed 
to  guilty  manipulation  may  in  part  have  been  due  to  guilt, 
but  has  a  simpler  explanation  in  the  fact  that  industry  had 
grown  more  rapidly  than  the  theory  of  the  state. 

When  Roosevelt  became  President,  the  executive  civil 
service  cost  the  United  States  about  one  hundred  and  thirty 
millions  a  year  in  salaries,  and  included  235,766  Federal 
positions,  of  which  108,967  were  classified  and  clvl1  service 
under  the  control  of  the  Civil  Service  Commission.  The 
number  thus  protected  included  most  of  the  responsible 
positions,  the  unclassified  places  being  open  chiefly  to  un 
skilled  and  low-paid  routine  workers.  In  the  next  sixteen 
years  before  the  World  War  overturned  the  civil  service,  and 
inflated  all  offices  beyond  recognition,  the  expanding  func 
tions  of  government  increased  much  more  rapidly  than  pop 
ulation.  In  1917  the  Civil  Service  Commission  controlled 
and  safeguarded  326,899  positions  in  the  executive  civil 
service  out  of  a  total  of  517,805.  In  these  years  the  debates 
in  Congress  as  revealed  in  the  Congressional  Record  lose 
something  of  their  value  to  the  historian,  but  their  loss  is 
more  than  supplied  by  the  testimony  and  reports  of  Con 
gressional  hearings  and  investigations.  The  United  States 
was  launched  upon  a  period  in  which  Government  control 
was  to  be  extended  not  only  over  the  ordinary  acts  of  life, 
but  over  the  unused  resources  of  national  existence. 


324     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 


BIBLIOGRAPHICAL  NOTE 

The  best  sources  of  muckraking  are  the  writings  of  the  muckrakers  that 
may  be  found  in  profusion  in  the  cheaper  magazines,  1903-07;  and  more 
especially  in  McClure's,  Everybody's,  The  American  Magazine,  and  Collier's 
Weekly.  S.  S.  McClure,  My  Autobiography  (1914),  is  a  frank  and  self- 
centered  narrative;  The  Americanization  of  Edward  Bok  (1920),  is  the 
autobiography  of  the  successful  editor  of  the  Ladies  Home  Journal. 
E.  A.  Ross,  Changing  America  (1912),  gives  a  sociologist's  evaluation  of 
the  new  forces.  James  R.  Day,  The  Raid  'on  Prosperity  (1907),  was  a 
famous  tract  defending  big  business  against  the  attacks  upon  it. 


CHAPTER  XXXIII 

THE  EXTENSION  OF  GOVERNMENT  CONTROL 

THE  ant i- trust  legislation  of  1903  was  accepted  as  a  recogni 
tion  by  the  Government  of  the  problems  before  it,  and  as  an 
earnest  of  new  laws  to  come.  The  Expedition  immjgra_ 
Act  made  it  easier  for  the  Government  to  en-  tion  prob- 
force  existing  laws  when  prosecution  was  deemed 
necessary,  and  the  Bureau  of  Corporations  soon  provided 
data  for  preliminary  opinions  as  to  both  legislation  and 
prosecution.  The  Bureau  of  Labor  made  a  continuous 
study  of  the  relations  of  labor  to  industry.  A  Bureau  of 
Immigration  was  brought  into  the  Department  of  Com 
merce  and  Labor,  and  a  new  general  immigration  law  was 
passed  in  1907.  The  close  relationship  between  immigra 
tion  and  labor,  recognized  in  the  work  of  these  bureaus,  was 
affected  by  the  changing  nature  of  the  immigrant.  The 
"  bird-of-passage "  was  increasing  in  number,  and  the  pro 
portion  from  the  races  of  southern  Europe  was  steadily 
growing.  The  wholesome  migration  from  northern  Europe 
that  had  brought  the  Irish,  the  Germans,  and  the  Scanr1'- 
navians  to  the  United  States  had  stopped.  Between  1900 
and  1914  the  annual  totals  of  immigration  ranged  from 
448,572  to  1,285,349,  of  which  northern  Europe  contrib 
uted  about  thirty-five  per  cent.  The  southern  immi 
grant  became  Americanized  less  easily  than  his  North  Eu 
rope  predecessors.  He  remained  isolated  in  racial  groups 
as  unskilled  labor  for  a  longer  period.  He  showed  less 
tendency  to  make  a  career  for  himself  and  his  family  out 
of  the  American  opportunity,  and  showed  a  constant  dis 
position  to  live  a  subnormal  economic  life,  accumulate  his 
surplus  earnings,  and  return  with  them  to  his  original 
home. 

The  interest  of  Roosevelt  in  the  drafting  and  passage  of 
necessary  legislation  was  continually  expressed.     The  elec- 


326     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

tion  of  1904  added  to  his  prestige,  and  weakened  the  powers 
of  the  opposition.  Speaking  at  the  Union  League  Club  in 
Philadelphia,  in  1905,  he  described  the  task  as  one  for  the 
preservation  of  equal  opportunity  for  rich  and  poor:  "  There 
must  be  no  hurry,  but  there  must  also  be  no  halt."  He 
had  already  succeeded,  in  connection  with  the  Northern 
Securities  prosecution,  in  proving  that  the  Sherman  Law 
possessed  some  teeth,  and  was  less  moribund  than  had  been 
believed. 

The  inauguration  of  the  Northern  Securities  prosecution 
in  1902  was  pushed  steadily  by  Knox,  and  under  the  Ex- 
Northern  pedition  Act  was  transferred  to  a  special  trial 
Securities  court,  whose  decision  in  favor  of  the  Government 
was  unanimously  concurred  in  by  the  Supreme 
Court  in  March,  1904.  The  guilty  corporation  was  ordered 
to  disband  and  disgorge.  Among  the  claims  of  the  Presi 
dent  in  the  campaign  of  this  year  was  that  of  having  proved 
himself  a  successful  "trust-buster."  The  business  interests 
involved  looked  at  it  from  a  different  angle.  It  was  too 
bad,  thought  James  J.  Hill,  "to  have  to  fight  for  our  lives 
against  the  political  adventurers  who  have  never  done  any 
thing  but  pose  and  draw  a  salary."  Within  both  parties, 
but  chiefly  within  the  Republican,  there  developed  a  group 
of  irreconcilable  conservatives,  many  of  whom  had  hoped 
for  Hanna  in  1904,  who  continued  increasingly  to  oppose 
Roosevelt  and  all  his  works. 

The  Northern  Securities  case  proved  that  successful 
prosecutions  were  possible,  but  not  that  the  problems  of 
concentration  could  be  solved  in  this  manner.  The  offense 
of  the  company  lay  in  the  merging  in  a  single  ownership  of 
the  control  of  stock  of  three  great  rival  railway  systems. 
When  the  company  disbanded  by  order  of  the  Supreme 
Court,  this  stock  was  distributed  among  the  owners  of  the 
Northern  Securities  stock,  each  of  them  receiving  shares  of 
the  Great  Northern,  the  Northern  Pacific,  and  the  Chicago, 
Burlington  &  Quincy  in  proportion  to  the  number  of  shares 
he  owned  in  the  Northern  Securities  Company.  As  a 
consequence  of  this  the  actual  ownership  of  the  three  rail- 


THE  EXTENSION  OF  GOVERNMENT  CONTROL    327 

roads  did  not  change.  The  same  group  of  individuals  who 
had  controlled  them  through  the  Northern  Securities  Com 
pany  continued  to  control  them  as  private  individuals. 
Experience  soon  showed  that  by  "gentlemen's  agreement" 
it  was  as  easy  for  these  owners  to  manage  their  property  in 
harmony  as  it  had  been  through  the  vehicle  of  a  holding 
corporation.  The  guilty  trust  was  broken  up  by  law,  but 
the  fact  of  consolidation  remained  as  large  as  ever. 

In  the  discussions  of  trust  and  railroad  control  that  ran 
parallel  to  the  Northern  Securities  prosecution,  from  1902 
to  1906,  the  question  emerges  as  to  whether  the    Economics 
solution  of  the  trust  problem  lay  in  the  Sherman    of  the  trust 

......  .  -,  problem 

Act  method  of  prohibition  or  in  some  other 
method  involving  the  elimination  of  unfair  practices,  while 
recognizing  the  consolidations  themselves  as  reasonable. 
The  experience  of  twenty  years  could  point  to  no  sure  case 
in  which  the  anti-trust  laws  had  succeeded  in  breaking  up 
consolidation  and  restoring  free  competition  among  small 
units.  Practical  economists  began  to  question  whether  the 
advantages  of  combination  could  be  repealed  by  statute. 
The  continued  reliance  of  Government  on  prosecution, 
however,  was  made  necessary  by  an  irritable  public  opin 
ion,  excited  by  the  facts  of  the  muckrakers,  led  on  in  many 
cases  by  irresponsible  reformers,  and  anxious  to  see  some 
body  punished  for  what  were  regarded  as  the  sins  of  society. 

The  railway  -laws  of  1903  were  preliminary  to  a  general 
revision  of  the  Interstate  Commerce  Act  of  1887.  Like 
the  Sherman  Act,  the  Interstate  Commerce  Act  aimed  to 
maintain  free  competition  among  the  railroads.  For  many 
years  the  Interstate  Commerce  Commission  continued  to 
add  new  facts  to  the  American  knowledge  of  the  railroad 
problem,  and  in  these  same  years,  unimpeded  by  the  law, 
the  great  railway  systems  of  the  eighties  had  matured,  and 
the  still  greater  systems  of  1901  and  1902  had  been  launched. 
The  law  was  to  be  revised  and  Congress  busied  itself  with 
the  content  of  the  revision. 

The  President's  messages  of  1904  and  1905  contained 
repeated  demands  for  the  enlargement  of  the  Interstate 


328     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

Commerce  Commission.  The  general  popularity  of  these 
demands  is  proved  by  the  multitude  of  railroad  laws  brought 
in  by  Congressmen  anxious  to  please  the  people  of  their 
districts.  Most  of  the  bills  drafted  were  conceived  in  ig 
norance  and  bad  temper,  as  the  original  Granger  laws  had 
been,  and  languished  permanently  in  the  committees  to 
which  they  were  referred.  Congress  was  slow  in  learning 
the  lesson  that  technical  economic  problems  could  be  solved 
only  on  the  basis  of  technical  economic  knowledge.  In  the 
session  of  1904  and  1905  one  of  the  railroad  bills  received 
the  almost  unanimous  support  of  the  House  of  Repre 
sentatives.  This  Esch-Townsend  Act  was  passed  by  a 
vote  of  326  to  17,  and  gave  to  the  Interstate  Commerce 
Commission  the  power  to  fix  the  rates  of  transportation. 
It  was  received  in  the  Senate  in  February,  1905,  and  there 
met  with  a  delay  that  exasperated  the  angry  opponents  of 
the  trusts,  who  relieved  their  feelings  by  attacking  the 
"treason"  and  the  "menace"  of  the  United  States  Senate. 
The  conservatism  of  the  Senate  was  built  into  it  by  the 
Constitution  for  the  purpose  of  creating  an  independent 
agency  willing  and  able  to  withstand  gusts  of  public  opinion. 
Whenever  the  Senate  has  fulfilled  the  original  intention,  it 
has  met  with  obloquy.  It  was  here  charged  with  being  in 
the  employ  of  the  trusts.  The  process  that  had  sent  suc 
cessful  men  of  affairs  to  the  Senate  in  the  nineties,  and 
brought  it  under  the  domination  of  a  group  like  Aldrich  of 
Rhode  Island,  Platt  of  New  York,  Quay  and  Penrose  of 
Pennsylvania,  Hanna  of  Ohio,  and  Spooner  of  Wiscon 
sin,  lent  itself  readily  to  the  attack  that  was  now  pressed. 
The  eager  advocates  of  immediate  railroad  legislation  de 
nounced  the  conservatism  of  these  Senators  as  service  to 
big  business  and  to  the  machine.  One  of  the  new  Senators, 
elected  in  January,  1905,  and  seated  in  1906,  assumed  the 
open  leadership  against  this  group.  This  was  Robert  M. 
La  Follette,  who,  fresh  from  a  successful  program  of  leg 
islation  for  corporation  control  in  Wisconsin,  began  as 
Senator  to  attack  the  corporations  in  season  and  out,  to 
propound  constructive  theories  for  their  control,  and  to 


THE  EXTENSION  OF  GOVERNMENT  CONTROL     329 

join  with  the  Democrats  in  demanding  roll-calls  on  votes 
whenever  possible.  In  the  long  vacations,  as  he  traveled 
on  Chautauqua  circuits  talking  to  the  common  people  on 
public  affairs,  he  read  these  roll-calls  with  telling  effect, 
strengthening  as  he  did  it  the  popular  idea  of  the  existence 
of  a  machine,  of  the  power  of  vested  interest,  and  of  in 
fidelity  among  the  people's  representatives. 

Uninfluenced  by  the  pressure  from  outside,  the  Senate 
directed  the  Committee  on  Interstate  Commerce  to  sit 
during  the  recess  of  1905  and  accumulate  data  upon  the 
problems  that  needed  more  adequate  control.  In  the  fol 
lowing  winter  this  report  was  available  in  five  great  volumes, 
the  President  had  renewed  his  advocacy  of  legislation,  a 
new  flood  of  private  bills  indicated  the  desire  of  Congress 
men  to  clear  their  records  before  their  constituents,  and 
some  of  the  bolder  legislators  claimed  that  their  panaceas 
had  the  tacit  support  of  the  White  House.  It  was  danger 
ous  for  Congressmen  to  go  too  far  in  this  direction  of  claim 
ing  approval  in  advance.  The  political  method  of  the 
President  was  swift  and  effective.  Again  and  The  Ananias 
again  he  defended  himself  by  denying  the  cor-  Club 
rectness  of  statements  of  his  associates.  His  denunciation 
of  Judge  Parker  in  1904  was  a  typical  instance.  E.  H. 
Harriman  was  later  brought  writhin  the  group,  and  the 
cartoonists  derived  much  pleasure  from  their  literary  cre 
ation,  the  "  Ananias  Club,"  into  which  no  man  was  ad 
mitted  until  the  President  had  openly  called  him  a  liar. 
But  the  desire  of  Congressmen  to  appear  to  be  associated 
with  the  President  in  his  attacks  upon  big  business  kept 
many  of  them  walking  in  the  danger  zone. 

In  the  spring  of  1906  the  Hepburn  Bill  took  shape  as  the 
railroad  measure  that  was  to  be  passed.      During  its  last 
stages,  a  report  from  the  Bureau  of  Corpora-    The  Hep_ 
tions  on  the  traffic  in  petroleum  brought  con-    bum  Rail- 
vincing  evidence  as  to  the  need  for  more  power 
in  Government,  whether  the  ultimate  aim  was  to  be  to 
destroy  the  trust  or  to  control  it.     A  concluding  debate 
brought  up  the  question  of  the  relation  of  railway  control 


330     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

to  the  course  of  justice.  The  bill  as  proposed  vested  in  the 
Interstate  Commerce  Commission  the  power  to  fix  rates. 
Critics  of  this  declared  that  such*  action  might  easily  be 
come  confiscatory,  and  that  rates  might  be  fixed  so  low 
as  to  require  the  roads  to  do  business  at  a  loss.  This, 
said  Knox,  who  had  withdrawn  from  the  Cabinet  to  be 
come  Senator  from  Pennsylvania,  would  involve  a  violation 
of  the  "due  process"  clause  of  the  Constitution.  The  most 
successful  of  the  anti-trust  jurists,  he  now  led  the  demand 
for  insertion  in  the  bill  of  a  recognized  right  of  judicial 
review  whereby  the  railroads  should  be  entitled  to  bring 
the  fairness  of  an  established  rate  before  the  courts.  The 
Senate  accepted  his  doctrine.  Three  times  the  measure 
went  to  conference  before  the  two  houses  could  agree,  and 
the  bill  could  become  a  law  on  June  29,  1906. 

The  Hepburn  Act  widely  extended  Government  control 
over  railroads.  Among  its  most  significant  clauses  from 
the  standpoint  of  regulation  was  one  that  empowered  the 
Interstate  Commerce  Commission  to  establish  uniform 
systems  of  accounting,  and  to  prescribe  what  books  the 
roads  should  keep,  and  how  they  should  keep  them.  A 
lack  of  genuine  comparative  knowledge  on  railroad  prob 
lems  impeded  railroad  control  from  the  start,  since  no  two 
roads  kept  identical  accounts,  and  none  permitted  public 
scrutiny.  The  organization  of  the  new  accounting  systems 
was  worked  out  in  the  next  few  years  under  the  direction  of 
Professor  Henry  Carter  Adams,  who  had  long  been  asso 
ciated  with  the  Commission  as  statistician.  Adams  was 
himself  a  protege  of  Thomas  Mortimer  Cooley,  of  Michigan, 
who  had  done  much  to  define  the  functions  of  the  Inter 
state  Commerce  Commission  in  its  early  years. 

As  it  became  clear  that  legislation  for  control  must  be 
expected,  railroad  practice  was  generally  modified  in  the 
Abolition  of  direction  of  improvement  of  manners  and  the 
free  passes  elimination  of  abuses.  The  old  practice  of  the 
railroads'  law  offices  to  fight  everything  was  displaced  by 
a  new  desire  to  compromise  and  avoid  trouble.  The  Hep 
burn  Act  forbade  the  issuance  of  private  passes,  and  con- 


THE  EXTENSION  OF  GOVERNMENT  CONTROL    331 

tributed  directly  to  the  cessation  of  an  old  abuse.  The 
railroads  had  ever  been  the  victims  of  petty  graft  by  pub 
lic  men  who  demanded  free  transportation  for  themselves. 
National  conventions  expected  to  be  brought  together  on 
free  passes.  Editors  regarded  them  as  among  the  per 
quisites  of  their  business,  and  even  among  the  reform  and 
anti-monopoly  extremists  it  is  possible  to  point  to  individ 
uals  who  expected  the  railroads  to  transport  them  without 
charge.  The  muckrakers  believed  that  the  pass  system  was 
a  form  of  petty  bribery.  In  any  event  it  was  a  fraud  upon 
the  stockholders  that  now  rapidly  disappeared. 

With  the  passage  of  the  railroad  law  the  United  States 
entered  upon  a  decade  of  legislation  for  the  extension  of 
its  powers  of  control.  A  second  law  passed  in  pure  Food 
June,  1906,  projected  federal  power  in  a  new  and  Act>  I9°6 
unexpected  direction,  for  the  protection  of  the  public  health. 
With  the  change  in  habits  of  life  brought  about  by  the  revo 
lution  in  communication  and  manufacture  in  the  eighties, 
population  drifted  from  the  farms  to  the  cities,  and  the  man 
ufacture  of  food  went  far  along  its  course  from  the  domestic 
basis  to  the  factory  basis.  In  the  meat  industries  the  de 
velopment  of  the  packing  companies  went  hand  in  hand 
with  the  rise  of  the  cow  country.  The  refusal  of  Europe  to 
permit  the  importation  of  American  meats  on  the  ground 
that  they  were  unfit  for  food  gave  the  incentive  to  create, 
in  1884,  the  Bureau  of  Animal  Husbandry  to  inaugurate  a 
policy  of  federal  meat  inspection.  The  creation  of  the  De 
partment  of  Agriculture  in  1889  and  the  broadening  of  meat 
inspection  in  1891  are  steps  in  the  progressive  extension  of 
public  control  over  the  food  of  the  country.  The  industrial 
changes,  to  which  the  packers  contributed,  continued  with 
out  stop.  Factory  food  displaced  home-cooked  food,  and 
the  grocer  came  to  carry  a  steadily  increasing  portion  of  his 
stock  in  proprietary  packages  instead  of  bulk.  The  cereal 
foods  came  into  line  before  the  Spanish  War.  Clever  in 
ventions  brought  into  the  market  shredded  wheat,  grape- 
nuts,  and  corn  flakes,  while  campaigns  of  national  adver 
tising,  brightened  with  doggerel  and  cartoon,  produced  a 
market  for  the  package  foods. 


332     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

The  growth  of  the  food  industries  was  attended  by  risks 
foreseen  from  an  early  period.  The  factory  provided  no 
substitute  for  the  vigilance  of  the  good  housewife  in  protect 
ing  the  quality  of  food,  the  standards  of  preparation,  or  in 
controlling  the  use  of  adulterants.  A  mild  interest  in  legisla 
tion  within  this  field  can  be  traced  for  many  years.  The 
rnuckrakers'  exploitation  of  the  packing-houses  brought  it 
within  the  realm  of  practical  politics  in  1906,  and  legislation 
to  protect  the  purity  of  food  and  drugs  was  placed  upon  the 
statutes  within  the  control  of  the  Department  of  Agricul 
ture.  The  scientific  determination  of  the  value  of  foods  and 
the  influence  of  adulterants  and  preservatives  was  still  to 
be  worked  out  and  manufacturers  were  still  to  be  convinced 
that  the  public  would  consume  as  readily  a  jam  containing 
artificial  coloring  and  synthetic  flavor  as  the  same  jam  dis 
honestly  labeled  as  a  pure  fruit  product.  The  detailed  and 
technical  work  involved  in  a  successful  assertion  of  a  policy 
of  food  control  brought  into  every  household  a  fuller  recog 
nition  of  the  new  functions  of  Government. 

In  1907  Congress  paused  in  its  task  of  constructive  legis 
lation  long  enough  to  terminate  an  old  problem  by  the  ad- 
Admission  mission  of  a  new  State.  Nearly  a  century  before, 
of  Okla-  Congress  had  entered  upon  a  policy  of  Indian 
consolidation  upon  the  western  frontier.  The 
Indian  Country  was  legalized  in  1830,  placed  under  the  con 
trol  of  an  Indian  Commissioner  in  1832,  and  safeguarded  by 
the  Indian  Intercourse  Act  of  1834.  No  sooner  had  the 
Indian  Country  been  clearly  established  than  the  process  of 
reducing  its  area  by  the  creation  of  new  States  was  begun. 
After  1854  it  was  reduced  to  a  tract  nearly  surrounded  by 
the  States  of  Kansas,  Arkansas,  and  Texas,  and  thereafter 
it  was  generally  though  incorrectly  known  as  the  "Indian 
Territory." 

The  fertile  lands  between  the  Red  River  and  the  Arkansas, 
dedicated  to  the  Indians  in  the  thirties,  aroused  the  cupidity 
of  white  settlers  half  a  century  later.  President  after  Presi 
dent  proclaimed  against  the  illegal  invasion  of  the  area. 
After  the  Civil  War,  as  a  penalty  for  sympathizing  with  the 


THE  EXTENSION  OF  GOVERNMENT  CONTROL     333 

Confederacy,  the  Indians  forfeited  a  portion  of  their  lands. 
In  the  later  eighties  they  sold  still  more  in  the  process 
whereby  their  own  holdings  were  reduced  to  a  basis  of 
severalty.  In  the  early  nineties  the  lands  of  Oklahoma 
were  opened  and  the  white  invasion  brought  into  existence 
a  new  territory,  that  before  1900  had  aspirations  to  become 
a  state.  A  long  dispute  over  the  basis  of  statehood  was 
waged  in  the  next  five  years.  Should  there  be  one  State  or 
two,  Indian  Territory  and  Oklahoma,  or  an  amalgamation? 
In  June,  1906,  Congress  finally  passed  an  enabling  act  for 
a  single  State,  and  in  the  winter  of  1906-07  the  people  of 
Oklahoma  gathered  in  their  constitutional  convention. 

There  is  no  shorter  route  to  an  understanding  of  the  con 
stitutional  ideals  of  any  period  in  American  history  than 
through  the  study  of  the  debates  whereby  a  new  State 
constitution  is  created.  Every  new  State  has  drawn  its 
first  citizens  chiefly  from  the  young  and  enthusiastic  classes 
of  its  neighboring  States.  These  have  invariably  begun  their 
work  with  the  fundamental  acceptance  of  the  underlying 
bases  of  American  government,  and  have  built  upon  these 
a  structure  embodying  the  ideals  of  the  moment.  The 
Oklahoma  constitution  was  long,  specific,  and  radical.  It 
recognized  the  duty  of  the  State  to  extend  a  protecting 
control  over  its  citizens.  It  was  approved  by  Bryan  with 
his  Populistic  background,  and  was  criticized  by  Taft,  now 
Secretary  of  War,  from  the  standpoint  of  the  conservative 
judge.  It  contained  as  its  novelty  in  government  a  scheme 
for  the  public  guarantee  of  bank  deposits,  and  became  the 
forty-sixth  State  in  the  Union  by  proclamation  of  the  Pres 
ident  November  16,  1907. 

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL  NOTE 

Balthazar  H.  Meyer,  The  Northern  Securities  Case  (1906),  is  a  careful 
study  of  the  concentration  of  railroads.  Albert  H.  Walker,  History  of  the 
Sherman  Law  (1913),  and  Oswald  W.  Knauth,  Policy  of  the  United  States 
towards  Industrial  Monopoly  (1914),  give  full  accounts  of  the  workings  of 
the  anti-trust  laws.  Charles  R.  Van  Hise,  Concentration  and  Control  (1912), 
presents  a  solution  of  the  trust  problem.  Roy  Gittinger,  History  of  the 
Formation  of  the  State  of  Oklahoma  (1917),  is  an  adequate  narrative. 


CHAPTER  XXXIV 
NATIONAL  RESOURCES 

THE  period  of  prosperity  ushered  in  by  President  McKin- 
ley  outlasted  the  terms  of  his  Republican  successors,  Roose- 
Period  of  velt  and  Taft.  Not  until  1913  was  there  any 
prosperity  general  depression  in  the  United  States  that 
threatened  to  bring  business  to  a  standstill.  From  time  to 
time  there  were  flurries  in  the  stock  market  that  were  more 
truly  ascribable  to  over-speculation  than  to  adversity.  The 
brief  crisis  of  May,  1901,  was  occasioned  by  stock  gambling 
incidental  to  a  struggle  for  the  control  of  the  Northern 
Pacific  Railway.  In  October,  1907,  there  came  a  somewhat 
larger  panic  that  was  ascribed  by  its  sufferers  to  the  med 
dling  of  Roosevelt  with  business,  and  was  called  the  "  Roose 
velt  panic." 

The  open  trouble  began  with  the  suspension  of  the 
Knickerbocker  Trust  Company  in  New  York  on  October  22. 
Panic  of  During  the  next  few  days  there  was  uncertainty 
1907  as  to  the  extent  to  which  the  collapse  might  go. 

A  string  of  Eastern  speculative  ventures,  in  whose  manage 
ment  there  had  been  an  element  of  fraud,  broke  down,  but 
the  clearing-houses  of  the  great  cities  managed  to  limit  the 
range  of  suffering.  Banks  in  general  restricted  their  pay 
ments  to  depositors  to  their  minimum  cash  necessities,  and 
large  numbers  of  checks  were  made  payable  only  through 
the  clearing-houses.  For  the  time  being  there  was  an  al 
most  complete  suspension  of  credit,  and  much  hoarding  of 
money  by  private  holders.  The  critics  of  the  President 
scolded  at  "Theodore  the  meddler"  and  the  New  York  Sun 
gave  wide  circulation  to  the  motto  of  business:  "Let  us 
alone." 

Whether  Roosevelt  was  responsible  or  not,  the  panic 
advertised  the  fact  that  the  Currency  Act  of  1900  had 
failed  to  stabilize  the  currency.  It  had  provided  a  policy 


NATIONAL  RESOURCES  335 

in  its  enunciation  of  the  gold  standard,  but  had  made  no 
step  toward  providing  either  a  currency  flexible  enough  to 
expand  and  contract  with  the  drains  upon  it,  or  a  credit 
system  properly  safeguarding  the  use  of  speculative  and 
commercial  capital.  The  part  played  by  the  clearing 
houses  in  mitigating  the  effects  of  the  panic  was  both  extra- 
legal  and  salutary.  By  restricting  the  payment  of  checks 
except  through  the  clearing-houses  it  was  possible  to  carry 
on  large  transactions  without  drawing  upon  the  limited 
supply  of  currency.  Solvent  banks  that  found  themselves 
without  sufficient  currency  to  meet  the  unexpected  demands 
were  allowed  to  resort  to  clearing-house  loans  for  which 
they  put  up  as  collateral  approved  securities  that  could  not 
be  marketed  at  once.  With  their  clearing-house  loans  they 
were  allowed  to  pay  the  balances  for  which  they  had  no 
cash. 

The  emergency  method  tided  the  country  through  the 
period  of  panic,  and  in  the  following  year  Congress  at 
tempted  to  meet  a  portion  of  the  need  by  passing  the  Al- 
drich-Vreeland  Act,  whereby  it  was  made  possible  in  times 
of  emergency  to  procure  and  pay  for  a  special  emergency 
currency.  The  Treasury  Department  printed  and  kept 
ready  for  issuance  several  hundred  million  dollars  of  this 
currency  to  be  issued  upon  collateraTwhen  another  emer 
gency  should  arise.  The  Aldrich-Vreeland  Act  did  some 
thing  to  increase  the  elasticity  of  the  currency  supply,  but 
did  not  touch  the  question  of  the  safeguarding  of  credit. 
A  monetary  commission  presided  over  by  Senator  Nelson 
W.  Aldrich  was,  however,  created  to  study  the  fundamen 
tals  of  financial  legislation.  The  report  of  this  commission 
was  ready  for  the  public  in  1912. 

The  "Roosevelt  panic"  was  a  sharp  reminder  of  the  de 
fects  in  the  financial  system,  but  those  who  hoped  that  it 
might  restrain  the  President  in  his  attacks  upon  business 
were  disappointed.  The  policies  looking  toward  the  ex 
tension  of  Government  control  were  pressed  steadily  toward 
their  legislative  goals,  while  in  the  conservation  of  national 
resources  Roosevelt  discovered  and  popularized  a  wide 


336     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

range  over  which   Government  powers,    if   they  existed, 
might  be  spread. 

The  dominant  influence   that  made  America  different 
the  rest  of  the  world  in  its  first  century  of  independ 
ence  was  the  possession  of  an  easily  accessible 


Disappear-  r          .       .  •  «  « 

ance  of  open  frontier  into  which  society  could  expand  at 


resources  were  plentiful  and  nearly 
free.  Timber  was  so  abundant  as  to  be  an  ob 
struction  to  the  pioneer.  Soil  was  so  fertile  that  the  wheat 
farmer  and  the  cotton  planter  used  up  its  fertility  by  single 
cropping,  and  developed  new  farms  as  they  discarded  old 
ones.  Not  until  the  open  frontier  disappeared,  about 
1890,  was  there  any  general  idea  that  the  resources  of  na 
ture  were  not  limitless.  Thereafter  the  idea  slowly  devel 
oped  that  American  society  would  one  day  approach  the 
Land  losses  position  already  reached  by  most  of  the  coun- 
and  conser-  tries  of  Europe,  in  which  it  wrould  need  to  ad 
minister  its  resources,  not  only  that  posterity 
might  be  provided  for,  but  in  order  that  it  might  secure  a 
fair  distribution  for  its  living  citizens.  Most  of  the  land 
suitable  for  general  farming  purposes  was  already  in  private 
hands  before  the  end  of  the  nineteenth  century.  Water, 
whether  used  for  irrigation,  for  power,  or  for  transportation, 
was  assuming  new  importance.  The  timber  resources  of 
the  nation  were  closely  involved  with  the  problems  of  water 
supply  and  land,  and  had  been  slashed  and  wasted  until 
economists  could  estimate  the  number  of  years  when  they 
should  disappear.  The  mineral  resources  were  undergoing 
a  continuous  process  of  consumption  and  waste.  Metals, 
coal,  and  oil  presented  different  aspects  of  the  same  problem 
of  conserving  the  supply  and  procuring  the  maximum  use. 
Movements  in  all  of  these  fields  of  activity  came  to  a  focus 
in  Roosevelt's  second  term. 

The  Homestead  Law  of  1862  gives  the  character  to  the 
last  phase  of  the  occupation  of  American  farm  lands  by  farm 
ers.  Working  upon  the  doctrine  that  the  frontiersman  who 
makes  a  farm  renders  a  public  service,  the  United  States 
proceeded  to  give  homes  to  citizens  willing  to  cultivate  them. 


NATIONAL  RESOURCES  337 

Before  the  panic  of  1893  most  of  the  desirable  lands  had 
been  taken  up,  and  many  subsequent  homestead  entries  ap 
peared  to  be  partly  fraudulent  in  character.  There  was  a 
provision  in  the  Homestead  Law  whereby  the  homesteader 
could  pay  a  minimum  cash  price  for  his  farm  and  be  relieved 
of  the  obligations  he  had  incurred,  and  be  free  to  sell  the 
farm.  An  increasing  proportion  of  commuted  homesteads, 
whose  entrymen  often  exercised  the  privilege  to  commute 
at  the  earliest  possible  date,  and  sold  immediately  to  great 
timber,  grazing,  or  mining  corporations,  proved  that  the 
law  was  being  used  for  the  erection  of  corporate  holdings 
instead  of  farms  for  citizens.  The  bona-fide  farmer  had 
difficulty  in  finding  suitable  farms,  but  there  remained 
abundant  land  in  the  Far  West,  rich  in  promise  if  its  arid 
ity  could  be  overcome. 

There  was  slight  interest  in  irrigation  until  after  the  open 
farms  had  been  exhausted.  The  creation  of  the  United 
States  Geological  Survey  in  1879  brought  to- 

f          ,       r  .  e  ^  Irrigation 

gether  lor  the  first  time  a  group  of  Government 
scientists  interested  in,  and  competent  to  devise  schemes 
for,  the  reclamation  of  the  arid  lands.  The  peculiar  fertility 
of  many  of  these  lands  lay  in  the  fact  that  they  were  in  a 
region  of  constant  sunshine  where  crops  could  grow  for  more 
than  a  normal  number  of  days  per  year;  and  also  in  that, 
having  little  rainfall,  the  accumulated  fertility  of  the  soil  had 
not  been  washed  away.  About  1889  Congress  authorized  a 
survey  of  irrigation  sites  in  the  United  States,  which  Major 
J.  W.  Powell,  of  the  Geological  Survey,  carried  out. 

The  construction  of  irrigation  works  was  a  financial  and 
engineering  task  beyond  the  capacity  of  the  pioneer  farmer. 
Small  groups  of  associated  farmers  could  do  something,  but 
in  general  there  was  needed  permanent  direction  and  large 
means  procurable  only  through  great  corporations.  When 
Roosevelt  became  President  there  was  pending  in  Congress 
a  measure  looking  toward  Government  participation  in  this 
work,  led  by  Senator  Francis  G.  Newlands,  of  Nevada. 
Western  Congressmen  were  urging  the  creation  of  a  rec 
lamation  fund  to  be  appropriated  by  the  United  States, 


338     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

and  to  be  used  for  the  construction  of  dams,  tunnels,  and 
ditches.  The  costs  of  construction  were  to  be  assessed  over 
the  farms  brought  under  ditch  in  "each  irrigation  project, 
and  as  the  individual  farmer  bought  his  farm  and  paid  off 
the  debt,  his  payments  were  to  go  into  the  revolving  fund 
for  reinvestment.  The  Newlands  Bill  became  a  law  June 
17,  1902,  at  once  an  extension  of  governmental  control  over 
a  huge  scientific  engineering  task,  and  an  assertion  of  a  new 
interest  in  the  use  of  the  natural  resources  that  remained. 
By  1909  nearly  eight  thousand  farms  had  actually  been 
brought  under  ditch  and  new  projects  were  in  course  of 
development  throughout  the  arid  region.  In  1903  President 
Roosevelt  appointed  a  commission  to  study  the  nature  of 
the  remaining  public  lands  and  to  report  upon  their  proper 
treatment. 

The  work  of  the  Reclamation  Service  developed  the  im 
portance  of  dam-sites  and  water  power,  which  were  soon 
Control  shown  to  be  entangled  with  the  use  of  the  inland 
of  water  waterways  for  transportation.  The  Bureau  of 
Corporations  made  it  its  business  to  study  the 
ownership  of  water  power,  and  discovered  that  not  only  was 
there  potential  water  power  sufficient  to  meet  all  the  me 
chanical  needs  of  the  United  States,  thus  relieving  the  drain 
on  coal  and  oil,  but  that  undeveloped  sites  were  rapidly 
being  acquired  by  the  General  Electric,  the  Westinghouse, 
and  other  corporations  interested  in  hydro-electric  power. 
In  many  cases  the  control  of  this  lay  outside  the  power  of 
the  United  States.  Water  rights  lying  within  single  States 
and  disconnected  with  the  public  domain  called  for  State 
control  or  none,  but  there  was  work  to  be  done  in  show 
ing  the  difference  between  proper  and  improper  methods 
of  control,  and  in  the  passage  of  a  suitable  law  for  water 
powers  belonging  to  the  Government.  The  dam  built 
across  the  Mississippi  River  at  Keokuk  brought  to  the  fore 
both  the  complex  nature  of  the  water  problem  and  its  rela 
tions  to  inland  navigation. 

The  building  of  the  dam  at  Keokuk  called  attention  to 
the  fact  that  the  old  glory  of  the  Mississippi  had  faded  away, 


NATIONAL  RESOURCES  339 

and  that  in  the  fifty  years  elapsed  since  the  completion  of 
the  first  bridge  across  it  at  Davenport,  the  rail-  nd  ^ 
road  had  possessed  itself  of  the  heavy  traffic  that  igation  - 
the  river  had  borne.  Mark  Twain,  at  the  sum-  £heM issis- 
mit  of  his  glory,  and  honored  with  the  degree 
of  D.C.L.  of  Oxford,  escorted  the  presidential  party  that 
cruised  down  the  Mississippi  after  the  ceremonies  at  the 
site  of  the  Keokuk  dam;  but  the  river  traffic  that  he  had 
known  in  his  youth,  and  perpetuated  in  Tom  Sawyer  and 
Life  on  the  Mississippi,  was  nothing  but  a  reminiscence. 
Along  the  line  of  the  Mississippi  and  the  Ohio  local  interests 
from  time  to  time  urged  that  the  steamboat  commerce  be 
revived.  The  Mississippi  itself  had  been  brought  under 
physical  control  by  the  United  States.  Levees  had  been 
constructed  at  all  the  danger  points,  the  channels  at  the 
mouth  had  been  made  clear,  and  there  was  nothing  to 
prevent  a  revival  of  the  steamboat  trade.  This,  it  was  sug 
gested,  might  serve  both  to  offer  an  effective  competition 
to  the  railroads  and  to  reduce  the  consumption  of  coal  for 
transportation.  In  March,  1907,  Roosevelt  appointed  an 
Inland  Waterways  Commission  to  survey  these  unused 
transportation  routes  and  to  report  upon  their  revival. 

Out  of  the  work  of  the  Inland  Waterways  Commission 
there  arose  the  suggestion  that  the  problem  of  conserving 
the  natural  resources  was  too  large  for  any  one  Forest 
commission,  too  intricate  for  any  single  group  of  reserves 
scientists,  and  too  close  to  the  public  interest  to  be  solved 
without  the  full  concurrence  of  all  sections  and  parties. 
The  chief  of  the  forestry  service,  Gifford  Pinchot,  had  much 
to  do  with  the  formulation  of  the  suggestion.  An  intimate 
friend  of  Roosevelt,  he  was  one  of  the  inner  group  with 
whom  the  President  played  tennis  and  indulged  in  cross 
country  tramps,  and  he  had  for  many  years  brought  into 
the  service  of  the  Government  an  understanding  of  the 
best  foreign  practice  in  the  administration  of  forests.  Con 
gress  had,  in  1891,  authorized  the  President  to  withdraw 
the  forest  lands  from  entry  in  the  public  domain.  By  the 
close  of  Harrison's  Administration  there  were  17,564,800 


340     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

acres  in  the  national  forest.  Cleveland  increased  the  forest 
reserves  to  18,993,280  acres,  McKinley  to  46,828,449,  while 
Roosevelt  multiplied  the  area  several  fold,  and  increased 
the  total  to  172,230,233  acres  before  he  left  office.  The 
forests  were  so  closely  involved  in  the  problems  of  river 
flow,  soil  waste,  and  timber  conservation,  that  it  was  nat 
ural  for  the  forestry  group  to  assume  a  leadership  in  the 
new  movement. 

On  May  13,  1908,  there  met  at  the  White  House  a  con 
ference  to  which  the  governors  of  all  the  States  had  been 
Conserva-  invited,  and  which  most  of  them  attended  ac 
tion  confer-  companied  by  scientific  advisers,  business  men, 
and  political  leaders.  For  three  days  this  con 
ference  maintained  its  sessions,  and  continued  its  discus 
sions  of  the  natural  resources  of  the  United  States  and  the 
problems  involved  in  their  management.  Never  before  had 
the  governors  been  gathered  for  a  national  purpose,  and 
there  were  numerous  suggestions  that  out  of  this  meeting 
there  might  arise  a  sort  of  house  of  governors  to  supple 
ment  the  deliberations  of  Congress.  Members  of  Congress 
watched  the  conference  with  much  suspicion,  because  of 
their  unfamiliarity  with  the  subject-matter  under  discus 
sion,  and  their  fear  that  new  policies  in  conservation  might 
upset  political  and  business  interests  of  long  standing. 
They  showed  this  suspicion  in  their  treatment  of  the  con 
servation  movement. 

A  few  days  after  the  White  House  conference  had  adver 
tised  at  once  the  new  national  movement  and  Roosevelt's 
interest  in  it,  the  President  appointed  a  National  Conser 
vation  Commission  of  forty-nine  members  selected  about 
equally  from  the  fields  of  politics,  industry,  and  science. 
This  commission  organized  in  the  autumn  of  1908  for  a  study 
of  the  minerals,  waters,  forests,  and  soils  of  the  United 
States.  In  more  than  forty  States  local  conservation  com 
missions  were  appointed  and  in  operation  before  the  end  of 
1909  supplementing  by  their  studies  the  work  of  the  na 
tional  commission.  In  December,  the  commission  held 
a  national  conference  before  which  a  draft  of  its  report  was 


NATIONAL  RESOURCES  341 

presented,  and  early  in   1909  President  Roosevelt  trans 
mitted  this  report  to  Congress. 

The  work  of  the  commission  revealed  the  political 
methods  of  Roosevelt,  and  the  suspicions  prevailing  in 
Congress.  The  commission  was  appointed  without  legal 
authority,  and  served  without  compensation.  Since  Con 
gress  had  provided  no  funds  for  its  clerical  assistance, 
Roosevelt  directed  each  of  the  executive  departments  when 
called  upon  by  the  commission  to  provide  the  information  it 
desired.  In  this  way  it  was  possible  for  the  commission  to 
include  in  its  report  three  volumes  of  technical  papers  on  the 
different  resources.  Congress,  however,  jealous  of  its  prerog 
atives  and  suspicious  of  the  work  in  question,  refused  an 
appropriation  to  provide  wide  circulation  to  the  report. 
The  President  declared  in  January,  1909,  that  the  "under 
lying  principle  of  conservation"  was  "the  application  of 
common  sense  to  common  problems  for  the  common  good." 
But  Congress  attached  to  one  of  the  appropriation  bills  a 
proviso  forbidding  the  executive  departments  in  the  future 
to  render  scientific  assistance  to  such  a  commission  as  this. 

The  National  Conservation  Commission  attracted  wide 
attention  to  the  problem  before  it.  Among  the  special  im 
mediate  needs  that  it  pointed  out  was  legislation  Bureau 
to  control  the  mining  of  coal.  Throughout  a  of  Mmes 
wide  extent  of  the  public  domain  coal  deposits  were  known 
or  suspected  to  exist.  The  early  land  laws  had  provided 
for  the  classification  of  public  lands  as  coal  lands  or  agricul 
tural,  but  no  attempt  had  been  made  to  prevent  the  oc 
cupation  of  lands  as  agricultural  when  their  value  was 
chiefly  with  reference  to  their  underlying  coal.  From  the 
reports  of  the  General  Land  Office  it  appeared  that  large 
areas  of  coal  lands  were  being  alienated  as  agricultural 
lands,  and  that  the  Homestead  Law  was  being  perverted 
by  collusion  between  entrymen  and  speculators,  whereby 
great  coal  interests  were  being  built  up  in  private  hands, 
and  the  United  States  was  being  deprived  of  this  portion  of 
its  common  heritage.  In  1909  Congress  modified  the  land 
laws  so  as  to  provide  for  the  separate  sale  of  the  agricultural, 


342     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

timber,  and  mineral  resources  of  the  land,  and  the  next  year 
the  Bureau  of  Mines  was  created  to  give  systematic  study 
to  the  problems  connected  with  this  industry. 

Once  the  importance  of  conservation  had  come  to  his 
attention,  Roosevelt  exerted  his  powers  to  protect  the 
Supervision  public  interest.  He  had  no  lawful  power  to 
of  business  dispose  properly  of  the  timber  or  mineral  lands, 
or  water  rights,  but  he  at  least  had  power  to  determine  what 
public  lands  should  remain  on  the  market  for  open  entry. 
He  accordingly  proceeded  with  surveys  to  discover  the 
resources  of  the  remaining  public  lands.  He  entrusted  to 
the  recognized  powers  of  the  Forestry  and  Reclamation 
Services  whatever  was  suitable  for  them,  and  the  remaining 
acreage  he  withdrew  from  entry  with  the  intention  of  hold 
ing  it  in  the  national  domain  until  Congress  should  take 
action  to  safeguard  the  public  interest.  In  his  later  writings 
he  regarded  his  work  for  conservation  as  the  most  important 
of  his  Administration.  Its  effect  upon  public  opinion  was  to 
raise  new  hopes  of  effective  governmental  action,  and  to  add 
to  the  uncertainties  with  which  business  regarded  the  future. 
The  trend  of  Government  control  had  already  established  the 
fact  that  business  must  expect  to  be  supervised.  The  idea 
of  conservation  suggested  that  great  fields  hitherto  open  to 
private  exploitation  were  hereafter  to  be  closed.  Public  in 
terest  had  been  asserted  as  a  factor  to  be  respected  in  all 
business,  and  to  this  was  now  added  the  interests  of  posterity. 

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL  NOTE 

The  most  useful  general  works  on  conservation  are  Charles  R.  Van  Hise, 
Conservation  of  Natural  Resources  (1910);  William  E.  Smythe,  Conquest  of 
Arid  America  (1900);  Frederick  H.  Newell,  Irrigation  in  the  United  States 
(1902).  There  are  numerous  useful  illustrated  articles  in  the  National 
Geographic  Magazine.  The  Report  of  the  National  Conservation  Com 
mission  was  published  in  a  small  edition  as  6oth  Cong.,  2d  Sess.,  Sen.  Doc. 
676;  that  of  the  Public  Lands  Commission  as  58th  Cong.,  3d  Sess.,  Sen. 
Doc.  189;  that  of  the  Inland  Waterways  Commission  as  6oth  Cong.,  ist 
Sess.,  Sen.  Doc.  325.  The  point  of  view  of  the  West  toward  conservation 
is  revealed  in  the  Proceedings  of  the  Public  Land  Convention  held  in 
Denver,  Colorado,  June  18,  19,  20,  1907  (Denver,  1907).  The  Annual 
Reports  of  the  Forestry  Service,  the  Reclamation  Service,  and  the  Com 
missioner  Of  the  General  Land  Office  are,  of  course,  indispensable. 


CHAPTER  XXXV 

WORLD  POWER 

BEFORE  the  disturbance  occasioned  by  the  panic  of  1907 
had  subsided  and  had  revealed  the  panic  as  a  squall  rather 
than  a  storm,  President  Roosevelt  embarked  American 
upon  a  new  venture  in  the  field  of  foreign  rela-  battle  fleet 
tions.  On  December  16,  1907,  a  fleet  of  American  battle 
ships  left  its  anchorage  at  Hampton  Roads  for  a  voyage 
around  the  Americas  to  northern  Pacific  waters  and  with 
the  ultimate  intent  to  cruise  around  the  world.  The  navy 
of  1907,  much  stronger  than  the  new  navy  whose  units  be 
haved  so  well  in  the  Spanish  War,  was  now  able  to  send  to 
sea  the  heaviest  battle  flotilla  that  the  world  had  seen. 
Sixteen  new  battleships  under  Robley  D.  Evans,  who  had 
commanded  the  Iowa  at  Santiago,  with  the  accompanying 
tenders  and  supply  ships,  tested  out  the  organization  of  the 
Navy  Department  and  the  fidelity  of  the  work  that  had 
been  done  since  1895.  In  February,  1909,  the  fleet  re 
turned  intact  and  triumphant,  having  completed  a  demon 
stration  that  impressed  every  foreign  office  in  the  world, 
and  strengthened  the  general  interest  in  the  new  rules  of 
naval  warfare,  which  were  signed  on  February  26,  1909,  by 
delegates  at  the  international  naval  conference  at  London. 
The  significance  of  the  circumnavigation  of  the  world  by 
the  new  fleet  of  battleships  was  variously  interpreted  as  a 
menace  of  war  and  an  act  of  peace.  The  project  was  un 
dertaken  on  Roosevelt's  responsibility  alone.  When  the 
fleet  started  no  funds  had  been  appropriated  to  take  it 
across  the  Pacific,  or  even  to  bring  it  back  from  the  Pacific 
waters  to  which  the  President  had  sent  it.  Its  mission  to 
the  Orient  was  ostensibly  a  friendly  visit,  but  the  President 
was  by  no  means  certain  that  it  would  not  be  attacked,  and 
had  prepared  the  fleet  for  fighting.  He  had  observed  what 
he  interpreted  to  be  an  air  of  truculence  in  the  correspond- 


344     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

ence  of  Japan,  and  had  been  advised  by  informal  friends 
that  the  time  would  come  when  Japan  would  contest 
American  power  in  the  Philippines  and  at  Hawaii.  If 
Japan  should  seize  this  moment  to  declare  war,  he  believed 
there  would  be  a  national  advantage  in  being  ready  for  it. 
If  there  should  be  no  attack,  he  believed  it  equally  advan 
tageous  to  have  made  a  demonstration  of  strength  in  Orien 
tal  waters.  At  the  time,  however,  the  public  was  left  to 
draw  its  own  inferences  as  to  the  meaning  of  the  venture, 
and,  as  it  worked  out,  the  voyage  was  provocative  of 
friendly  international  relationships,  and  revealed  an  un 
hoped-for  capacity  in  the  naval  organization. 

The  fleet  of  1907,  though  able  to  make  the  most  impres 
sive  naval  demonstration  yet  seen,  was  none  the  less  nearly 
obsolete.  The  great  powers  had  ceased  laying  down  the 
keels  of  vessels  of  the  battleship  class,  and  were  instead 
experimenting  with  dreadnaughts.  In  July,  1908,  a  Navy 
Department  conference  at  Newport  worked  in  secret  upon 
the  designs  for  four  new  dreadnaughts,  and  when  the  keels 
of  these  were  laid,  North  Dakota,  Delaware,  Utah,  and 
Florida,  it  was  believed  that  no  better  ships  were  under 
construction  anywhere.  The  first  of  these  was  commis 
sioned  in  1910.  By  the  end  of  1916  thirteen  were  in  com 
mission  and  four  more  were  building,  and  the  great  armada 
of  1907  had  become  at  best  a  second  line.  Within  the  Navy 
Department  improvement  in  organization  progressed  with 
naval  architecture.  The  complete  independence  of  the 
several  bureaus  that  lessened  the  capacity  for  team-work, 
and  developed  all  of  the  forces  for  inertia,  was  under  con 
tinuous  fire.  In  1915  a  new  Bureau  of  Naval  Operations 
was  created  to  act  as  a  general  staff  for  the  navy  under 
command  of  William  S.  Benson,  with  the  rank  of  admiral. 

Reorganization  proceeded  in  the  War  Department  as  in 
the  navy.  Under  the  General  Staff  Act  of  February  14, 
War  de-  I9°3>  it  was  sought  to  increase  the  efficiency  of 
partment  the  army  by  the  organization  of  a  corps  whose 
duty  should  be  to  prepare  war  plans  and  super 
vise  their  execution.  The  new  procedure  had  to  fight  its 


WORLD  POWER  345 

way  against  the  opposition  of  the  older  officers,  and  the 
political  interference  occasioned  by  their  friends  in  Con 
gress.  Year  after  year,  however,  the  schools  at  Fort 
Leavenworth  and  the  War  College  in  Washington  grad 
uated  their  little  groups  of  army  specialists.  The  rule  that 
forbade  officers  to  stay  on  administrative  detail  away  from 
their  troops  for  more  than  four  years  out  of  six,  weakened 
the  power  of  the  "Manchu"  class.  One  of  these,  it  was 
declared,  had  been  on  a  single  staff  duty  for  forty-three 
years.  With  the  consistent  support  of  President  Roosevelt 
and  his  secretaries,  the  new  type  of  officer  and  of  army 
organization  was  given  a  chance  to  establish  itself.  Every 
year  the  older  type  became  less  numerous  through  retire 
ments,  and  every  year  a  large  percentage  of  the  young  men 
had  a  new  conception  of  their  duties.  General  S.  B.  M. 
Young,  the  first  chief  of  staff,  was  succeeded  by  Adna  R. 
Chaffee,  and  he  in  succession  by  John  C.  Bates,  J.  Franklin 
Bell,  Leonard  Wood,  William  W.  Wotherspoon,  and  Hugh 
L.  Scott,  who  was  in  office  at  the  entry  into  the  \Vorld  War 
in  1917.  It  was  not  possible  in  these  years  to  produce 
from  Congress  a  more  thoroughgoing  army  act  than  Root 
had  evoked  while  Secretary  of  War,  but  within  the  General 
Staff  there  was  developed  an  idea  of  what  an  army  ought  to 
be  that  was  ready  for  the  test  in  1917,  and  was  not  found 
wanting. 

When  Root  temporarily  retired  from  the  Cabinet  in  1904, 
Roosevelt  recalled  William  Howard  Taft  from  the  Philip 
pine  Islands  to  take  his  place  as  Secretary  of  Taft  and 
\Var.  Under  Taft's  administration  the  Philip-  the  colonies 
pines  had  been  progressing  toward  orderly  government  and 
self-government.  Natives  of  the  islands  were  admitted  to 
seats  upon  the  governing  commission,  and  plans  were  laid 
for  the  ultimate  establishment  of  a  native  assembly.  Judge 
Taft  was  successful  not  only  in  pacifying  the  islanders, 
but  in  carrying  on  a  negotiation  with  the  Vatican.  At 
the  date  of  the  Treaty  of  Paris  a  large  proportion  of  the 
area  of  the  Philippine  Islands  was  owned  by  the  various 
orders  of  the  Catholic  Church.  Through  the  diplomatic 


346    RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

negotiation  of  Taft  the  title  to  these  was  settled  by  agree 
ment  in  1903.  The  sanitary  work  in  Cuba  was  duplicated 
in  the  Philippines,  and  the  establishment  of  schools  upon 
the  American  plan  was  followed  by  a  revival  of  the  ancient 
university  at  Manila.  A  new  generation  was  started  with 
no  recollection  of  Spanish  rule,  speaking  English  and  con 
scious  of  the  processes  of  American  government.  The 
erection  of  the  Filipino  Assembly  in  1907  was  followed  by  a 
steady  increase  in  the  proportion  of  Filipinos  in  Govern 
ment  offices  and  on  the  Council.  By  1916  the  local  control 
of  insular  affairs  was  in  every  direction  in  the  hands  of 
native  islanders. 

World  politics  continued  to  call  for  American  interven 
tion  as  Roosevelt  rebuilt  the  tools  of  national  defense. 
The  Treaty  of  Portsmouth,  signed  on  September  5,  1905, 
drew  the  United  States  into  world  affairs  as  moderator, 
and  gained  for  Roosevelt  the  following  year  the  award  of 
the  Nobel  prize  for  services  to  the  cause  of  peace. 

The  war  between  Japan  and  Russia  that  was  ended  in 
this  treaty  broke  out  in  1904,  with  Japan  assuming  the 
Russo-Jap-  aggressive  to  prevent  the  continuous  encroach- 
anese  War  ment  of  Russia.  Ten  years  earlier  Japan  had 
shown  her  strength  as  a  modern  military  power  by  crushing 
the  resistance  of  China  within  a  few  weeks.  The  Treaty  of 
Shimonoseki,  in  1895,  brought  her  little  reward,  since  the 
European  powers  exerted  pressure  to  moderate  her  terms. 
In  the  next  few  years  they  extended  their  own  holdings  in 
northern  China,  and  Russia  pushed  to  completion  her  rail 
road  to  the  Pacific.  With  its  main  line  running  to  a 
terminus  at  Vladivostok,  Russia  laid  hands  upon  Man 
churia  and  built  a  branch  line  extending  to  Port  Arthur. 
Repeated  pledges  to  return  Manchuria  to  China  were 
followed  by  repeated  acts  for  the  strengthening  of  the 
defenses  of  Port  Arthur.  In  February,  1904,  Japan  de 
clared  war  against  Russia,  and  John  Hay  began  diplomatic 
pressure  to  limit  the  area  of  hostilities  and  to  safeguard 
China  by  a  recognition  of  her  neutrality  and  her  "  admin 
istrative  entity"  by  both  belligerents.  By  the  spring  of 


WORLD  POWER  347 

1905  Japan  gained  notable  victories  over  Russia,  whose 
army  operated  at  a  disadvantage  at  the  terminus  of  the 
single-track  Siberian  railway,  and  whose  naval  force  col 
lapsed.  The  successes  of  Japan  brought  both  her  mate 
rial  and  her  financial  resources  to  the  verge  of  exhaustion. 
Both  belligerents  were  anxious  for  peace  if  it  could  be 
obtained  without  seeming  to  invite  it. 

On  June  8,  1905,  began  the  negotiation  of  a  peace.  "I 
first  satisfied  myself,"  said  Roosevelt,  "that  each  side 
wished  me  to  act,  but  that,  naturally  and  properly,  each 
side  wras  exceedingly  anxious  that  the  other  side  should  not 
believe  that  the  action  was  taken  on  its  initiative.  I  then 
sent  an  identical  note  to  the  two  powers."  The  move 
ment  thus  started  advanced  rapidly  toward  consummation. 
Commissioners  were  appointed  on  both  sides  to  negoti 
ate  peace,  and  through  the  summer  of  1905  they  sat  at 
the  Portsmouth  Navy  Yard,  in  New  Hampshire,  after  a 
formal  reception  on  the  presidential  yacht,  Mayflower,  at 
Oyster  Bay.  More  than  once  during  the  conference  the 
danger  of  a  deadlock  appeared,  but  as  the  weeks  advanced 
the  President  exerted  continuous  pressure  to  produce  an 
agreement.  Japan  found  England  willing  to  renew  the 
treaty  of  alliance  of  1902;  and  Russia,  experimenting  with 
self-government  and  the  first  phases  of  revolution,  felt  the 
need  of  peace.  The  conclusion  of  the  treaty  prepared  the 
way  for  a  resumption  by  the  powers  of  the  negotiation 
begun  at  The  Hague  in  1899,  but  before  the  Second  Hague 
Conference  convened,  Europe  was  brought  to  the  verge  of 
war  by  the  crisis  at  Morocco. 

The  status  of  Morocco  involved  the  interests  of  England, 
France,  and  Germany.     England  and  France  had  agreed 
in  1904  that  France   should  be  responsible  for    Algeciras 
the  maintenance  of  order  there.     The  German    Conference 
Empire,  anxious  to  break  up  the  new  friendly  relations  be 
tween  England  and  France,  insisted  upon  independence  for 
Morocco,  or  international  control.      In  March,   1905,  the 
Emperor  visited  the  Sultan  at  Tangier  "to  make  it  known 
that  I  am  determined  to  do  all  in  my  power  to  safeguard 


348     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

efficaciously  the  interests  of  Germany  in  Morocco."  The 
result  of  this  dramatic  "rattling  of  the  saber"  was  a  general 
conference  on  the  Moroccan  question  held  at  Algeciras  in 
January,  1906.  The  work  of  the  conference  has  an  im 
portant  bearing  upon  European  rivalries  that  were  already 
leading  Europe  toward  a  general  war.  The  United  States 
was  represented,  and  may  even  have  caused  the  conference; 
the  newly  acquired  interest  in  world  politics  was  recognized 
by  the  rest  of  the  powers ;  and  the  Administration  recognized 
the  American  share  in  the  responsibility  for  international 
peace. 

The  first  conference  at  The  Hague  adjourned  in  1899  in 
the  hope  that  it  might  be  followed  by  a  second  confer- 
Second  ence  which  should  continue  its  discussion  of  the 
Hague  laws  of  war,  the  reduction  of  armaments,  and 
the  arbitration  of  controversies.  The  court  of 
justice  created  by  the  conference  was  seldom  used  until  the 
United  States  appeared  there  as  a  litigant  in  the  contro 
versy  with  Mexico  over  the  Pius  fund,  and  induced  the 
European  powers  to  bring  thither  their  claims  against 
Venezuela.  President  Roosevelt  determined  in  1904  to 
summon  a  second  conference,  and  Hay  issued  a  preliminary 
note  to  that  effect,  but  the  Russo-Japanese  War  made  the 
date  inappropriate,  while  Russia  indicated  a  desire  to  invite 
the  conference.  Upon  the  signature  of  the  Treaty  of  Ports 
mouth,  the  Russian  ambassador,  Baron  Rosen,  brought  up 
the  matter,  with  the  result  that  on  June  15,  1907,  the 
delegates  convened  at  The  Hague.  Among  the  topics  sug 
gested  for  discussion  the  limitation  of  armaments  was  the 
most  important.  England,  just  embarking  upon  the  con 
struction  of  the  early  dreadnaughts,  was  anxious  to  reach 
some  agreement  to  lessen  the  cost  of  the  naval  rivalry. 
The  American  delegates,  headed  by  Joseph  H.  Choate,  were 
ready  to  support  this  movement,  but  the  continental  powers 
were  found  to  be  unwilling  to  entrust  their  safety  to  any 
thing  but  their  own  armed  forces.  The  Algeciras  episode 
intensified  the  French  fear  of  German  attack,  while  in  Ger 
many  the  military  party  was  deliberately  relying  upon  war 


WORLD  POWER  349 

and  conquest  as  a  means  of  securing  national  advantage. 
The  American  delegation  presented  the  old  American  ideal 
of  the  exemption  of  private  property  from  capture  at  sea. 
The  South  American  delegations  supported  the  doctrine  of 
their  publicist,  Drago,  that  the  forcible  collection  of  pri 
vate  international  debts  must  be  forbidden. 

The  work  of  the  second  conference  was  summed  up  in 
several  conventions  relating  to  the  pacific  settlement  of 
international  disputes,  the  Drago  doctrine,  and  the  laws  of 
war.  An  attempt  to  create  a  real  court  of  arbitral  justice 
was  defeated  by  the  inability  of  the  conference  to  agree 
upon  the  selection  of  its  judges.  It  was  determined  to  hold 
a  conference  upon  maritime  warfare  in  the  near  future,  and 
to  hold  a  third  great  conference  at  The  Hague  at  a  suitable 
date. 

The  naval  conference  was  initiated  by  Great  Britain  in 
1908  and  convened  in  the  following  winter  with  ten  naval 
powers  represented.     The  Declaration  of  Lon-    The  Decla- 
don   that   it  formulated  was  proposed  to  the    ration  of 

11.  .    A  f     ,  London 

world  in  1909  as  an  interpretation  of  the  gen 
erally  recognized  principles  of  international  law."  Its 
seventy  articles  covered  blockade,  contraband,  unneutral 
service,  enemy  character,  and  search.  It  was  never  rati 
fied,  even  England  withholding  its  formal  approval,  but  it 
was  accepted  as  a  statement  of  the  general  trend  of  inter 
national  maritime  law. 

'Each  year  after  1900  the  United  States  became  more 
closely  involved  in  the  intricacies  of  world  politics,  and 
each  year  brought  closer 'the  date  at  which  the  United 
States  would  be  free  from  the  restrictions  placed  upon  its 
policies  by  the  lack  of  a  waterway  across  the  Isthmus  of 
Panama.  The  negotiations  with  England  with  reference 
to  the  new  canal  were  concluded  in  1901  upon  terms  which 
left  the  United  States  free  to  choose  the  means  and  meth 
ods  of  construction.  Immediately  Hay  took  up  with  the 
Republic  of  Colombia  negotiations  for  the  transfer  of  the 
rights  that  were  controlled  by  the  French  Canal  Company 
at  Panama,  and  Congress  took  up  the  question  of  route 


350     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

and  method  of  construction.  As  the  debate  progressed  in 
Congress  the  advocates  of  a  route  by  way  of  the  San  Juan 
River  and  Lake  Nicaragua  came  to  open  issue  with  the 
friends  of  the  Panama  route,  who  were  headed  by  Senator 
Hanna  and  President  Roosevelt.  Unable  to  command  a 
vote  in  Congress  for  either  route,  it  was  agreed  in  June, 
1902,  that  the  President  should  have  authority  to  select 
the  route. 

Early  in  1903  Hay  signed  with  the  Colombian  Minister, 
Herran,  an  agreement  authorizing  the  United  States  to 
take  over  the  French  concession  at  Panama,  and  to  control 
the  zone  through  which  the  canal  should  run.  There  had 
already  been  excitement  and  dismay  among  the  owners  of 
the  French  company  because  of  a  recommendation  from  a 
commission  of  engineers  headed  by  Rear-Admiral  John  G. 
Walker  that  the  extortionate  price  demanded  by  the  canal 
company  for  its  property  made  it  preferable  for  the  United 
States  to  turn  from  Panama  and  build  at  Nicaragua. 
The  French  company  immediately  discovered  that  forty 
million  dollars  would  be  a  suitable  price  instead  of  one 
hundred  and  twenty  millions.  The  Walker  commission 
changed  its  recommendation  accordingly,  and  the  signa 
ture  of  the  Hay-Herran  Treaty  was  regarded  as  removing 
the  last  of  the  diplomatic  obstacles.  In  the  Senate,  how 
ever,  Senator  Morgan,  of  Alabama,  who  believed  in  the 
Nicaragua  route,  led  a  filibuster  that  prevented  ratification 
in  the  current  session.  The  President  immediately  called-  a 
special  session  of  the  Senate  in  March,  1903,  at  which  the 
Hay-Herran  Treaty  was  ratified. 

There  was  no  satisfaction  with  the  treaty  in  Colombia, 
where  the  opponents  of  the  Administration  that  had  nego 
tiated  it  charged  variously  that  ten  millions  cash  and  an 
annuity  of  two  hundred  and  fifty  thousand  dollars  a  year 
was  not  a  sufficient  price  for  the  right  of  way;  that  it  was 
unconstitutional  to  grant  the  exclusive  jurisdiction  over 
the  canal  zone  involved  in  the  treaty ;  and  that  it  was  Presi 
dent  Marroquin's  intention  to  appropriate  the  sum  for  pri 
vate  purposes  rather  than  to  turn  it  into  the  Treasury. 


WORLD  POWER  351 

For  one  reason  or  another  action  by  the  Colombian  Congress 
was  delayed  throughout  the  summer  of  1903,  and  that  body 
adjourned  in  the  end  of  October  permitting  the  treaty  to 
die  without  action. 

While  Colombia  delayed  to  pledge  herself  with  reference 
to  the  canal,  American  opinion  fretted,  and  the  French 
owners  of  the  concession  despaired,  because  in  1904  their 
rights  would  lapse  and  the  unfinished  enterprise  would  re 
vert  to  the  ownership  of  Colombia  in  accordance  with  the 
terms  of  their  contract.  In  the  autumn  President  Roosevelt 
prepared  a  message  for  Congress  recommending  the  seizure 
of  the  canal  zone  by  the  United  States  on  the  ground  that 
the  work  contemplated  was  in  the  interests  of  "collective 
civilization."  About  the  same  time  he  wrote  a  private 
letter  expressing  a  wish  that  the  State  of  Panama  would 
secede  from  Colombia  and  negotiate  directly  for  the  canal 
rights,  but  declared  that  his  official  position  debarred  him 
from  acting  toward  this  end. 

The  French  Canal  Company  was  already  acting  in  the 
same  direction.  Its  agent,  Bunau-Varilla,  visited  Washing 
ton  and  learned  that  if  public  disorder  arose  on  The 
the  isthmus,  the  United  States  would  regard  it  Panama 
as  its  duty  under  a  treaty  with  New  Granada 
(Colombia)  of  1846  to  intervene  to  maintain  order,  even 
though  this  intervention  should  restrain  Colombia  from 
suppressing  her  insurgents.  This  was  as  much  as  the  in 
habitants  of  Panama  desired.  On  November  3,  1903,  a 
quick  and  bloodless  revolt  took  place,  the  independence  of 
the  isthmus  was  proclaimed,  an  American  naval  force  pre 
vented  the  landing  of  Colombian  troops  to  put  it  down, 
and  Roosevelt's  message  advocating  seizure  became  un 
necessary.  A  few  days  later  the  Republic  of  Panama  was 
recognized  at  Washington,  and  by  a  treaty  of  November 
18,  1903,  conceded  to  the  United  States  everything  that 
Colombia  had  refused. 

Roosevelt  continued  until  his  death  to  defend  the  equity 
of  his  treatment  of  Colombia.  He  acted  immediately  upon 
the  new  condition  created  by  the  Panama  treaty,  and  in 


352     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

the  spring  of  1904  began  the  work  of  actual  construction  of 
Canal  con-  the  canal.  On  the  engineering  side  there  was 
struction  sharp  difference  of  opinion  respecting  the  mer 
its  of  a  sea-level  canal  or  one  with  locks.  The  latter  type 
was  determined  upon  because  of  the  less  cost  and  shorter 
period  required  for  construction.  The  French  company 
had  already  done  much  of  the  preliminary  excavation,  but 
had  learned  little  about  sanitation  in  the  tropics.  Its  Euro 
pean  engineers  and  workmen  had  died  like  flies  in  the  huts 
along  the  route  of  the  canal.  The  sanitary  renovation 
of  the  Zone  was  among  the  earliest  of  the  American  tasks 
and  in  this  Colonel  Gorgas  applied  what  had  been  learned 
in  Cuba,  until  the  healthful  conditions  of  the  Zone  became, 
in  the  opinion  of  Sir  Frederick  Treves,  a  triumph  for  pre 
ventive  medicine. 

The  administrative  control  of  construction  was  vex 
atious  because  the  task  called  for  executive  direction, 
while  Congress  wished  the  control  to  be  through  a  com 
mission.  One  engineer  after  another  resigned  the  task 
until  finally  George  W.  Goethals,  a  major  in  the  regular 
army,  was  made  chairman  and  chief  engineer  in  1907.  The 
rest  of  the  members  of  the  commission  were  appointed  by 
the  President,  subject  to  their  promise  never  to  disagree 
with  the  chairman;  by  which  means  the  commission  was 
turned  into  an  executive  agency.  "  Damn  the  law.  I  want 
the  canal  built,"  Roosevelt  is  said  to  have  remarked  to 
Goethals  as  he  entrusted  him  with  the  task.  Five  times 
before  1910  Taft  went  to  Panama  to  inspect  the  progress 
of  the  work  of  construction,  and  in  1906  Roosevelt  himself 
established  a  new  precedent  for  Presidents  by  leaving  the 
territory  of  the  United  States  in  order  to  visit  the  work 
that  he  had  so  vigorously  advanced. 

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL  NOTE 

James  Brown  Scott,  The  Hague  Peace  Conferences  of  1899  and  igoj 
(1909),  and  William  I.  Hull,  The  Two  Hague  Conferences  and  their  Contribu 
tion  to  International  Law  (1908),  contain  a  narrative  of  American  participa 
tion  at  The  Hague.  In  the  American  Journal  of  International  Law  (1907-) 
there  may  be  found  special  articles  on  most  aspects  of  current  diplomatic 


WORLD  POWER  353 

relations  as  well  as  texts  of  the  basic  documents.  Joseph  B.  Bishop, 
The  Panama  Gateway  (1913),  is  a  popular  account.  There  are  many 
details  in  the  writings  of  Philippe  Bunau-Varilla,  Panama:  The  Creation, 
Destruction,  and  Resurrection  (1914),  and  The  Great  Adventure  of  Panama 
and  its  Relation  to  the  World  War  (1920).  Roosevelt's  Autobiography  is,  of 
course,  of  value,  as  well  as  Root's  addresses  which  have  been  collected 
under  the  title  The  Military  and  Colonial  Policy  of  the  United  States  (1916). 


CHAPTER  xxxvi 

WILLIAM  HOWARD  TAFT 

THE  Sixtieth  Congress,  the  last  of  the  Roosevelt  Adminis 
tration,  sat  from  1907  to  1909.  The  acts  passed  and  those 
Political  that  it  rejected  indicated  clearly  the  trend  of 
manners,  events  within  the  Republican  Party  as  the  time 
approached  for  another  presidential  election. 
The  breach  that  had  been  healed  in  1904,  after  the  death 
of  Hanna,  was  now  wide  open,  as  "stand-pat"  Republicans 
strove  to  bring  about  the  nomination  of  a  conservative 
candidate,  and  to  put  an  end  to  the  period  of  executive 
action  and  interference  with  business.  Manners  as  well  as 
policies  were  involved  in  the  breach.  The  aggressive  as 
surance  of  Roosevelt  alienated  his  enemies  and  was  trying 
even  to  his  friends.  The  rapidity  with  which  he  reached 
decisions  and  acted  upon  them  startled  and  embarrassed 
many  of  his  associates.  The  readiness  with  which  he  called 
men  liars  and  asserted  that  all  honest  men  agreed  with  him 
alienated  within  his  own  party  many  who  would  have 
preferred  to  act  in  harmony  with  him. 

The  succession  in  1908  was  not  complicated  by  any 
prospect  that  Roosevelt  would  again  be  a  candidate.  Dur 
ing  the  campaign  of  1904  there  had  been  much  mild  dis 
cussion  as  to  how  he  would  stand  with  reference  to  the 
national  tradition  against  three  terms.  Technically  his 
first  period  as  President  was  McKinley's  term  and  not  his 
own.  On  election  night,  after  enough  returns  were  in  to 
indicate  that  his  vote  had  run  away  from  Judge  Parker, 
and  that  his  election  was  assured,  he  voluntarily  answered 
the  question  in  these  words:  "On  the  4th  of  March  next  I 
shall  have  served  three  and  a  half  years,  and  this  three  and 
a  half  years  constitutes  my  first  term.  The  wise  custom 
which  limits  the  President  to  two  terms  regards  the  sub 
stance  and  not  the  form,  and  under  no  circumstances  will 


WILLIAM  HOWARD  TAFT  355 

I  be  a  candidate  for  or  accept  another  nomination."  Re 
peatedly  in  the  next  four  years  he  reiterated  this  announce 
ment,  and  found  the  leaders  of  his  party  ready  to  take  him 
at  his  word. 

For  twelve  years,  by  1909,  individual  party  leaders  had 
been  submerged  beneath  the  personalities  of  McKinley 
and  Roosevelt,  and  the  rigor  of  party  discipline.  The  en 
thusiasm  with  which  public  opinion,  regardless  of  parties, 
approved  the  "Roosevelt  policies"  made  it  difficult  for 
other  individuals  than  Roosevelt  to  command  attention. 
The  list  of  possibilities  discussed  in  the  months  preceding 
the  campaign  reveals  the  diversity  of  opinion  that  had 
developed  within  the  dominant  party. 

The  leading  names  among  the  "stand-pat"  candidates 
were  Joseph  G.  Cannon,  Charles  W.  Fairbanks,  and  Joseph 
Benson  Foraker.  Cannon  wras  now  Speaker  in  Republican 
his  third  term,  and  possessed  a  wide  and  homely  leaders 
popularity  together  with  the  complete  confidence  of  con 
servative  Republicans.  Fairbanks  was  Vice-President,  an 
austere-appearing  Indiana  politician,  who  made  no  claim 
to  popularity  and  enjoyed  none.  Foraker,  of  Ohio,  was 
among  the  last  of  the  spell-binders  of  the  Civil  War  regime. 
Belonging  to  the  generation  of  Garfield,  Hanna,  and  Mc 
Kinley,  Foraker  saw  himself  for  more  than  twenty  years 
within  reach  of  national  preferment  and  just  missing  it.  His 
hopes  as  a  nominee  of  the  available  type  were  forcibly  de 
ferred  when  McKinley  became  the  "advance  agent  of  pros 
perity"  in  the  early  nineties.  When  Hanna  desired  to  enter 
politics  as  Senator,  Foraker  found  himself  again  forced  to 
step  aside.  In  the  fall  of  1907  he  formally  announced  his 
candidacy,  and  announced  himself  as  favoring  the  tariff 
and  the  independence  of  the  Senate,  and  as  opposing  rail 
way  rate  regulation  and  the  liberal  construction  of  the  Con 
stitution.  Once  more  he  found  himself  with  ambitions 
blocked  by  another  Ohio  leader,  William  Howard  Taft. 

Not  a  candidate  himself,  President  Roosevelt  was  in  a 
position  to  throw  the  nomination  nearly  as  he  pleased.  The 
trend  of  politics  made  it  easy  for  a  President  of  influence  to 


356     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

exert  strong  pressure  on  the  National  Convention.  The 
Republican  Party  maintained  a  political  organization 
throughout  the  South  from  which  it  neither  expected  nor 
received  electoral  votes.  In  Republican  administrations 
the  handful  of  Southern  Republicans  received  their  reward 
in  federal  appointments.  Roosevelt  appears  to  have  been 
in  conference  on  this  theme  on  the  first  day  of  his  presi 
dency.  Whether  the  Republican  appointees  were  good  or 
bad,  they  could  not  be  representative  of  the  people  among 
whom  they  served,  and  when  they  elected  themselves  as 
delegates  to  the  national  nominating  convention,  they 
tended  to  bring  into  that  body  a  block  of  votes  subservient 
to  the  President  to  whom  they  owed  their  jobs.  With 
these  delegates  to  start  with,  and  with  a  wide  popular  ap 
proval  of  his  policies,  Roosevelt  was  able  to  block  the  hopes 
of  candidates  whom  he  disliked  and  advance  those  of  his 
friends. 

Three  names  were  most  commonly  mentioned  as  likely 
to  secure  the  support  of  the  President,  Charles  Evans 
Hughes  Hughes,  William  Howard  Taft,  and  Elihu  Root 
Taft,  and  whom  Roosevelt  regarded  as  the  ablest  man  he 
had  known  in  public  life.  The  reconstruction 
of  the  War  Department  and  the  administrative  organi 
zation  of  the  new  colonies  were  accomplished  by  Root.  As 
Secretary  of  State  he  had  taken  over  the  difficult  foreign 
problems  that  were  pending  when  John  Hay  surrendered 
his  portfolio.  In  the  Orient  he  proved  himself  a  firm  and 
tactful  negotiator,  reaching  a  general  understanding  with 
Japan  about  her  immigration  into  the  United  States  and  her 
relations  with  China.  In  1907  he  visited  the  Latin-Ameri 
can  countries  to  interpret  in  a  friendly  way  the  position  of 
the  United  States  and  to  moderate  their  suspicions  that  had 
been  stirred  up  by  the  Panama  affair.  But  whatever  his 
strength,  he  was  unavailable  to  receive  presidential  sup 
port  for  the  nomination.  His  whole  life  until  1899  had  been 
spent  as  a  corporation  lawyer  in  New  York,  and  his  business 
affiliations  were  regarded  as  t  .  iilnc-f  ble  to  permit  him 
to  be  nominated  upon  a  Roosevelt  platform,  i  ?pted 


WILLIAM  HOWARD  TAFT  357 

instead  election  to  the  Senate  from  New  York,  entering 
upon  his  term  in  1909.  The  friends  of  Governor  Charles 
E.  Hughes,  of  New  York,  hoped  that  he  might  receive  presi 
dential  endorsement.  Governor  Hughes  was  a  practicing 
attorney  in  New  York  City  when  in  1905  he  was  called  upon 
to  act  as  counsel  for  the  Armstrong  Committee  of  the  New 
York  Legislature,  appointed  to  investigate  the  conduct  and 
management  of  the  insurance  companies.  He  speedily  be 
came  the  responsible  director  of  the  investigation,  showing 
unusual  skill  in  extracting  facts  from  reluctant  witnesses, 
and  in  uncovering  the  distasteful  story  of  the  intrigue  of 
business  in  politics.  Before  the  investigation  was  com 
pleted  he  was  suggested  as  mayor  of  New  York  City,  which 
he  declined  to  consider;  but  in  1906  he  was  nominated  for 
governor  by  a  convention  in  which  there  was  no  delegate  in 
structed  for  him,  and  no  partisan  politician  who  desired 
him.  In  the  following  election  he  defeated  William  Ran 
dolph  Hearst;  and  he  took  office  with  the  magnates  of  his 
party  hostile  to  him.  His  career  as  governor  made  him  a 
marked  national  figure.  No  Republican  had  given  more 
convincing  proof  of  his  determination  to  establish  the  people 
in  control  of  their  government  and  the  government  in  con 
trol  of  business  malpractice.  Roosevelt  was  unwilling  to 
support  him  for  the  nomination  because  he  believed  him 
too  independent  of  the  party  organization,  and  disliked  his 
tendency  to  play  a  lone  hand. 

William  Howard  Taft  was  announced  as  Roosevelt's 
choice  in  1907.  For  nearly  twenty  years  his  career  as  an 
administrator  and  judge  had  brought  him  into  intimate 
contact  with  two  sides  of  government.  A  son  of  Judge 
Alphonso  Taft,  of  Cincinnati,  who  had  sat  in  Grant's  Cab 
inet  for  a  time,  he  had  been  an  honor  man  at  Yale  and  a 
judge  in  the  superior  court  of  Ohio  before  Harrison  made 
him  Solicitor-General  in  the  Department  of  Justice  at  the 
age  of  thirty-three.  Before  McKinley  sent  him  to  the  Phil 
ippines  ten  years  later,  Taft  had  lived  in  Washington  and 
had  sat  upon  the  federal  bench.  In  the  labor  controversies 
of  the  nineties  he  showed  judicial  courage  in  asserting  the 


358     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

powers  of  Government  over  the  obstructions  of  organized 
labor,  and  a  little  later  his  decisions  brought  the  trusts 
within  the  jurisdiction  of  the  Sherman  Act.  Roosevelt 
while  Vice-President  described  him  as  a  suitable  governor 
of  the  Philippines,  asserting  that  that  task  called  for  all  the 
qualifications  that  would  make  a  good  President  or  a  sound 
Chief  Justice.  It  was  toward  the  Supreme  Court  that  Taft's 
own  inclinations  pointed,  but  he  was  forced  twice  to  let 
the  opportunity  go  because  of  administrative  duties  in 
hand  in  the  islands  or  the  War  Department.  Never  did  a 
group  of  statesmen  work  more  harmoniously  than  Roose 
velt  with  Root  and  Taft.  "Athos"  and  "Porthos"  were 
the  nicknames  of  his  favorite  secretaries,  used  sometimes 
in  their  informal  correspondence ;  and  it  requires  little  imagi 
nation  to  ascribe  to  Roosevelt  the  name  of  the  hero  of  the 
Three  Musketeers  —  "D'Artagnan." 

At  times  between  1905  and  1909  Taft  was  described  as 
the  traveling  secretary  of  the  President  because  of  the  fre 
quency  with  which  he  was  sent  to  represent  Roosevelt  on 
political  missions,  or  to  "  sit  on  the  lid"  -  a  task  for  which 
his  figure  seemed  to  make  him  singularly  appropriate.  He 
was  officially  in  charge  of  the  American  intervention  in 
Cuba,  1906-09;  he  often  visited  the  Panama  Canal  to  re 
port  on  progress  in  construction;  he  carried  on  negotia 
tions  with  the  Vatican  in  Rome,  made  visits  of  courtesy 
in  Japan,  and  opened  the  Philippine  Assembly  in  1907. 
As  a  presidential  candidate  he  was  doubly  strong.  He 
had  become  an  intimate  agent  of  the  Roosevelt  program 
and  a  supporter  of  its  policies,  which  made  him  acceptable 
as  a  progressive  leader.  On  the  other  hand,  as  judge  and 
administrator  he  had  shown  a  firmness  and  a  judicial  tem 
per  that  brought  to  him  the  confidence  of  those  conserva 
tives  who  thought  Roosevelt  too  impulsive.  His  candi 
dacy  was  pushed  persistently  by  the  President  as  the  date 
for  the  Republican  Convention  approached,  and  accord 
ing  to  the  rumor  among  the  Washington  correspondents, 
the  matter  was  clinched  by  asseverations  from  the  White 
House  of  "Taft  or  me." 


WILLIAM  1TOWARD  TAFT  359 

The  Republican  nominations  of  1908  were  made  at  Chi 
cago  with  Roosevelt  in  complete  control  of  the  convention. 
The  platform  had  been  prepared  in  Washing-  Taft  and 
ton  and  was  given  to  the  press  even  before  the  Sherman 
convention  met.  Conservative  Republicans  found  no  op 
portunity  to  organize  their  hostility  to  Roosevelt,  and  the 
progressive  Republicans  had  no  chance  to  incorporate  any 
planks  not  acceptable  to  the  President.  Taft  was  nomi 
nated  on  the  first  ballot;  James  Schoolcraft  Sherman,  a 
conservative  New  York  Republican,  who  had  sat  in  nine 
Congresses,  was  nominated  as  Vice-President.  The  friends 
of  Hughes  were  unable  to  make  any  impression  on  the  con 
vention,  and  in  the  autumn  Hughes  was  renominated  and 
reflected  governor  of  New  York. 

Between  the  Republican  and  Democratic  National  Con 
ventions  Grover  Cleveland  died,  on  June  24,  1908.  The 
last  eleven  years  of  his  life  had  carried  him  into  Death  of 
a  position  of  dignity  and  popularity.  He  re-  Cleveland 
tired  to  Princeton  upon  leaving  the  White  House  in  1897 
and  there  engaged  in  literary  enterprises  and  public  service. 
The  esteem  which  both  parties  denied  him  as  President 
came  to  him  out  of  office.  In  1904  there  was  even  talk 
among  Democrats  who  especially  feared  Bryan  of  urging 
him  for  another  Democratic  nomination.  He  gave  no 
countenance  to  this,  however,  and  continued  until  the  end 
to  be  an  unconventional,  rugged,  and  honest  adviser  of 
his  fellow-countrymen. 

At  the  Democratic  Convention  which  met  in  Denver  in 
July,  the  Roosevelt  policies  were  as  popular  as  in  the  Re 
publican  Party.  Many  of  the  measures  that  had  Bryan  and 
recently  received  executive  approval  were  among  Kern 
those  suggested  or  advocated  by  the  Populists.  The  fig 
ure  of  Bryan  that  had  terrified  the  owners  of  property  in 
1896  had  ceased  entirely  to  alarm,  and  Bryan  himself  was 
completely  in  control.  The  South  and  West  were  united 
for  him,  and  the  opposition  to  his  renomination  among 
Eastern  Democrats  was  discredited  by  the  fact  that  the 
Tammany  organization  was  against  him.  Judge  Parker, 


360    RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

the  last  candidate,  was  at  the  convention  in  command  of 
the  conservative  delegates,  who  were  defeated  and  ignored 
by  the  convention.  Reporters  who  measured  popularity 
by  noise  noted  that  the  Denver  Convention  applauded 
Bryan  for  eighty-seven  minutes,  whereas  the  name  of  Roose 
velt  had  received  only  forty-six  minutes'  applause  at  Chi 
cago.  John  W.  Kern,  of  Indiana,  was  nominated  for  Vice- 
President. 

The  minor  parties  of  1908  presented  numerous  and  un 
important  tickets.  William  Randolph  Hearst,  a  consist- 
Third  ent  Democratic  opponent  of  Bryan,  formed  his 
parties  owTi  Independence  Party,  and  nominated  himself 
for  President.  The  Populist  Party  had  nearly  disappeared. 
"You  ask  me  what  we  are  to  do,"  wrote  Thomas  E.  Watson 
after  he  had  received  the  Populist  nomination  for  the  presi 
dency.  "Frankly,  I  don't  know.  The  Democratic  Party  is 
chaotic;  the  Republican  Party  is  becoming  so;  the  Populist 
Party  is  dead,  and  we  are  all  at  sea."  A  handful  of  former 
Populists,  still  clinging  to  a  hope  of  a  union  of  agricultural 
and  industrial  discontent,  tried  to  form  a  new  American 
Party,  and  nominated  Wharton  Barker  for  the  presidency, 
but  the  American  Party  "died  a-borning,"  wrote  its  vice- 
presidential  candidate,  "Calamity"  Weller,  of  Iowa.  "The 
only  difficulty  was  we  could  not  raise  money  enough  to  put 
it  on  its  feet  and  keep  it  there  until  it  could  run  the  race 
with  decent  and  enticing  respectability." 

The  Socialists  renominated  Eugene  V.  Debs,  but  ran  an 
unimportant  third  in  the  canvass,  with  421,000  votes.  The 
effort  of  its  leaders  to  attract  the  vote  of  organized  labor 
was  persistent.  The  New  York  Call,  founded  as  a  daily 
May  30,  1908,  with  this  in  view,  interpreted  the  news  of  the 
day  from  a  Socialist  slant.  The  Western  Federation  of 
Miners  had  been  captured  by  the  Socialist  leaders,  but  or 
ganized  labor  in  general  followed  the  course  urged  by  Sam 
uel  Gompers,  head  of  the  American  Federation  of  Labor, 
which  was  to  support  their  friends,  punish  their  enemies, 
and  keep  out  of  politics  as  a  body. 

The  point  over  which  labor  was  fighting  in  1908  was  the 


WILLIAM  HOWARD  TAFT  361 

attitude  of  the  courts  toward  strikes.  For  fifteen  years, 
since  Debs  was  jailed  for  contempt  in  the  Pull-  Labor  and 
man  strike  of  1893,  the  practice  had  increased  P°lltlcs 
of  forbidding,  by  injunction,  acts  that  the  unions  regarded 
as  necessary.  The  sympathetic  strike,  boycott,  and  inter 
ference  with  business  by  picketing  and  intimidation,  wrere 
at  various  times  forbidden  by  this  practice,  and  violators 
of  the  injunctions,  imprisoned  for  contempt  of  court,  found 
themselves  with  slight  legal  redress.  Opposition  to  what 
the  unions  described  as  government  by  injunction  pervaded 
the  ranks  of  organized  labor.  Gompers  himself  was  in 
volved  in  contempt  proceedings  with  the  Supreme  Court, 
arising  from  the  Buck  Stove  and  Range  Case.  At  Chicago 
he  appeared  before  the  Republican  Committee  on  Platform, 
seeking  an  anti-injunction  plank,  and  was  rebuffed.  At 
Denver  he  was  better  treated,  and  when  the  Democratic 
Party  included  a  protest  against  injunctions  in  its  platform, 
Gompers  came  out  in  support  of  Bryan  and  the  Democratic 
ticket,  urging  labor  to  follow  him  and  reward  its  friends, 
thus  beginning  a  sort  of  alliance  with  the  Democratic  Party 
that  lasted  until  the  World  War. 

The  presidential  canvass  of  1908  was  carried  out  in  good 
temper  so  far  as  the  chief  candidates  were  concerned. 
Bryan,  rehabilitated  by  Roosevelt's  support  of  many  of  his 
policies,  contested  with  Taft  as  to  which  leader  and  party 
might  the  better  carry  out  the  program  upon  which  both 
ostensibly  agreed.  'The  time  is  ripe,"  he  wrote,  "for  an 
appeal  to  the  moral  sense  of  the  nation ;  the  time  is  ripe  for 
the  arraignment  of  the  plutocratic  tendencies  of  the  Repub 
lican  Party  before  the  bar  of  public  conscience;  and  the 
Democratic  Party  was  never  in  better  position  than  now  to 
make  this  appeal." 

No  episode  of  the  canvass  was  as  sharp  in  a  personal  way 
as  Roosevelt's  denunciation  of  Parker  in  1904.  An  attempt 
was  made  to  discredit  Taft  as  a  Unitarian,  which  was  re 
buked  by  a  letter  from  Roosevelt  upon  religion  and  politics 
that  silenced  those  who  were  trying  to  inject  denomina 
tional  theology  into  the  campaign.  An  attempt  to  make 


362     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

political  capital  out  of  a  casual  remark  by  Taft  with  refer 
ence  to  General  Grant  was  equally  unsuccessful.  A  forged 
letter  bearing  the  signature  of  Grover  Cleveland,  and  an 
nouncing  his  preference  for  Taft  over  Bryan,  aroused  a 
ripple  of  interest,  but  had  no  result.  Only  Hearst  suc 
ceeded  in  diverting  public  attention  to  irrelevant  matters. 

In  the  middle  of  September,  while  Hearst  was  campaign 
ing  for  himself  as  a  candidate  of  the  Independence  Party,  he 
read  into  his  speeches  letters  that  some  one  had  stolen  from 
the  files  of  the  Standard  Oil  Company.  However  he  got 
them,  they  cut  into  both  great  parties  alike.  Haskell,  the 
Oklahoma  member  of  the  Democratic  National  Committee 
and  its  treasurer,  was  shown  to  have  had  such  business 
relations  with  the  Standard  Oil  Company  as  to  prevent  his 
further  use  by  a  party  that  denounced  monopoly.  J.  B. 
Foraker,  of  Ohio,  one  of  the  Stalwart  Republican  con 
testants  for  the  nomination,  was  similarly  caught  in  the 
exposure.  Foraker  maintained  with  angry  insistence  the 
correctness  of  his  relation,  and  it  was  a  commonplace  that 
he  had  never  even  pretended  to  desire  Government  control 
over  business;  but  he,  too,  speedily  retired  from  public  life. 
The  public  temper  that  the  muckrakers  had  produced  and 
that  the  Roosevelt  attacks  upon  the  habits  of  business  had 
intensified,  was  dominant  in  both  parties.  Whether  voting 
for  Taft  or  Bryan,  the  bulk  of  the  voters  desired  a  further 
extension  of  the  policies  of  Government  control. 

Taft  and  Sherman  were  chosen  in  an  election  that  re 
vealed  an  unusual  amount  of  independent  voting.  Demo- 
Election  cratic  governors  were  elected  in  four  of  the  States 
of  Taft  that  the  Republican  ticket  carried  for  the  presi 

dency.  The  signs  indicated  that  neither  party  organi 
zation  retained  its  usual  control  over  the  loyalty  of  its 
members.  Only  the  "Solid  South"  remained  thoroughly 
regular.  Here  the  process  of  disfranchising  the  negro  by 
constitutional  amendment  was  brought  near  to  completion 
when  Georgia,  in  October,  1908,  adopted  a  suffrage  amend 
ment  establishing  a  new  educational  qualification  for  the 
franchise  that  barred  most  negroes.  The  Democratic  Party 


WILLIAM  HOWARD  TAFT  363 

continued  in  complete  control  of  the  Southern  vote.  Such 
political  debates  as  there  were  were  restricted  to  the  pri 
maries  of  that  party.  On  election  day  the  outcome  was 
known  in  advance,  and  only  a  handful  of  voters  cast  their 
ballots. 

The  main  issue  in  the  election  was  the  relative  respon 
sibility  of  Taft  or  Bryan. 

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL  NOTE 

The  autobiographical  writings  of  Foraker,  Roosevelt,  La  Follette,  and 
Mrs.  Taft  throw  considerable  light  upon  the  period  1905-10,  which  re 
mains,  withal,  without  much  source  material  apart  from  the  current  peri 
odical  literature,  the  usual  Government  reports,  and  the  Congressional 
Record. 


CHAPTER  XXXVII 

THE  PARTY  PLEDGE 

11  NEVER  before  in  our  time  has  the  entry  of  a  new  President 
into  office  marked  so  slight  a  break  politically  between  the 
present  and  the  past,"  said  the  New  York  Tribune,  as  it 
commented  upon  the  installation  of  Judge  Taft  on  March 
4,  1909.  The  new  Administration  was  regarded  as  a  con 
tinuation  of  the  old,  and  Taft  in  his  inaugural  frankly 
accepted  the  duty  of  upholding  the  policies  of  Roosevelt. 
He  pledged  himself  to  bring  forward  as  soon  as  possible 
amendments  to  the  Sherman  Act  for  the  improvement  of 
public  control  over  trusts,  and  officially  announced  his  in 
tention  to  call  the  Sixty-First  Congress  —  the  eighth  con 
secutive  Republican  Congress  —  in  an  early  special  session 
to  revise  the  tariff.  There  was  no  denunciation  in  his 
message,  but  through  it  there  ran  the  belief  that  the  work 
ahead  would  call  for  creative  and  constructive  legislation  of 
the  highest  order. 

Roosevelt  left  Washington  for  Oyster  Bay  immediately 
after  the  inaugural  ceremony,  creating  a  new  precedent 
Departure  by  not  returning  to  the  White  House  with  his 
of  Roosevelt  successOr.  The  ceremonies  themselves,  held  in 
the  Senate  Chamber  because  of  a  heavy  storm,  were  of 
necessity  simple  in  character,  and  the  throngs  of  visitors  and 
attendant  governors  with  their  trains  found  their  oppor 
tunities  for  display  curtailed.  The  last  days  of  the  preced 
ing  Administration  had  been  turbulent,  with  Congress  in 
dignant  at  Roosevelt,  and  with  an  unseemly  discussion  of 
governmental  practices  emphasizing  the  fact  that  for  the 
time  being  Roosevelt's  hold  over  the  politicians  of  his  party 
had  been  broken.  There  was  a  new  temper  in  Washington 
politics  from  the  date  of  the  inauguration,  while  Colonel 
Roosevelt  in  Oyster  Bay  kept  his  hands  off  the  policies  of 
Taft,  and  tested  the  camping  outfit  with  which  he  proposed 


THE  PARTY  PLEDGE  365 

shortly  to  hunt  big  game  in  Africa.  Not  until  the  summer 
of  1910  was  it  possible  for  politicians  to  get  his  ear.  He 
plunged  into  the  jungle  with  the  parting  statement  that 
any  interview  purporting  to  reveal  his  views  might  safely 
be  regarded  as  untrue. 

The  Taft  Cabinet  was  dominated  by  careful  lawyers. 
Philander  C.  Knox,  formerly  Attorney-General  and  now 
Senator  from  Pennsylvania,  resigned  his  seat  to  become 
Secretary  of  State.  Two  members  of  the  outgoing  Cabi 
net  were  retained,  Meyer,  who  was  transferred  from  the 
Post-Office  to  the  Navy,  and  James  Wilson,  who  had  been 
Secretary  of  Agriculture  for  three  Administrations.  As 
Postmaster-General  Taft  appointed  Frank  H.  Hitchcock, 
chairman  of  the  Republican  National  Committee,  and 
manager  of  his  campaign.  Hitchcock,  like  Cortelyou,  had 
risen  in  the  civil  service  and  gained  preferment  by  attract 
ing  the  attention  of  the  President. 

Before  Congress  met  in  its  special  session  on  March  15, 
1909,  there  had  been  comment  as  to  whether  it  would  be 
practicable  for  it  to  perform  the  tasks  expected  of  it.  At 
no  time  had  the  liberal  Republicans  controlled  the  organi 
zation  of  the  House  of  Representatives.  Cannon,  Speaker 
since  1903,  had  the  full  confidence  of  the  "stand-pat" 
group,  among  which  the  demand  for  tariff  revision  and 
trust  control  had  made  slight  impression.  The  effect  of  the 
agitation  of  the  last  eight  years  was  to  arouse  popular  ex 
pectations,  but  also  to  stimulate  the  opposition  of  interests 
that  had  something  to  lose  by  the  new  policies.  A  little  had 
been  done  in  the  control  of  corporations,  and  Government 
authority  had  been  widely  extended  in  new  fields,  but  the 
basic  laws  were  still  to  be  constructed  and  enacted. 

From  1880  until  1896  the  Republican  Party  became  more 
and  more  completely  a  party  of  protection.     Leaders  like 
Hanna  frankly  demanded  campaign  contribu-    Tariff 
tions  commensurate  with  the  profits  that  manu-    revision 
facturers  expected  to  get.      In  1888  one  of  the  rare  cam 
paigns  with  a  real  issue  sharply  separating  the  parties  was 
fought  over  the  tariff;  and  when  public  interest  drifted 


366     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

toward  currency  problems  in  the  nineties,  Hanna  kept  the 
party  organization  true  to  the  tariff.  McKinley  as  Presi 
dent  broadened  his  view  of  world  problems,  and  came  to 
appreciate,  what  James  G.  Elaine  had  clearly  seen,  that 
the  Chinese  wall  of  the  protective  tariff  acts  as  a  restriction 
upon  foreign  trade.  In  his  last  public  speech  at  Buffalo, 
at  the  exposition  in  honor  of  the  Pan-American  idea,  he 
urged  the  adoption  of  a  liberal  policy  of  reciprocity. 

Other  reasons  than  those  of  foreign  trade  weakened  the 
hold  of  protection  upon  the  Republican  Party  in  the  next 
eight  years.  The  farmers  of  the  Middle  West  reverted  to 
their  old  belief  that  tariffs  helped  the  manufacturer  more 
than  the  farmer.  In  the  McKinley  Bill  there  had  been  a 
deliberate  attempt  to  satisfy  this  feeling  by  including  a 
schedule  on  agricultural  imports,  but  since  agricultural  im 
ports  were  then  and  continued  to  be  relatively  unimportant, 
the  concession  failed  to  stop  the  anti-tariff  drift.  About 
1900  the  tariff  was  connected  with  the  idea  of  monopoly. 
The  belief  spread  that  special  tariff  privileges  lay  at  the 
foundation  of  big  business,  and  one  of  the  magnates  of  the 
Sugar  Trust  openly  called  the  tariff  the  "  mother  of  trusts." 

In  1902  the  "Iowa  idea,"  to  the  effect  that  tariff  rates 
ought  to  be  reduced,  started  a  reaction  against  the  tariff 
that  was  continuous  thereafter.  In  Wisconsin  and  Minne 
sota  it  took  root,  and  its  advocates  made  common  cause 
with  other  local  leaders  who  desired  to  convert  the  party 
organization  into  a  more  active  agent  against  the  trusts. 
Between  1902  and  1904  Roosevelt  showed  that  he  was  at 
tracted  by  the  idea  of  tariff  revision,  but  after  the  death  of 
Hanna  he  made  temporary  peace  with  the  conservatives 
and  thereafter  had  little  to  say  about  tariff  revision  except 
that,  as  his  second  term  advanced,  he  indicated  that  it 
would  be  a  task  for  his  successor. 

The  Republican  Convention  of  1908  pledged  the  next 
Administration  to  a  revision  of  the  tariff.  In  the  canvass, 
Judge  Taft  took  the  pledge  seriously  and  promised  not  only 
a  revision,  but  a  revision  downward.  Between  election 
and  inauguration  he  visited  Washington  to  confer  with  the 


THE  PARTY  PLEDGE  367 

party  leaders  and  to  urge  that  the  Committee  on  Ways  and 
Means  begin  the  gathering  of  materials  for  a  tariff  revision 
to  be  handed  over  to  the  new  committee  after  the  4th  of 
March.  In  November  tariff  hearings  began,  and  before 
Roosevelt  went  out  of  office  a  draft  had  been  prepared  in 
secrecy,  and  was  nearly  ready  to  be  introduced  in  the  new 
Congress.  Whether  or  not  it  could  be  introduced  was  prob 
lematical  until  after  the  organization  of  the  lower  house. 
A  group  of  Republican  Congressmen  had  already  started  a 
revolt  against  the  Speaker,  the  rules,  and  the  party  policy, 
and  there  were  enough  of  these  insurgents  to  control  the  or 
ganization  of  the  House  if  they  could  induce  the  Democrats 
to  work  with  them.  They  failed  in  this  attempt,  and  Can 
non  was  nominated  by  the  Republican  caucus  and  reflected. 
A  little  later,  when  they  opposed  the  readoption  of  the 
House  rules,  enough  Eastern  Democrats  voted  with  the  Re 
publicans  to  insure  the  maintenance  of  the  old  policy.  A 
conservative  Speaker  appointed  Sereno  E.  Payne  chair 
man  of  the  Committee  on  \Vays  and  Means,  and  the  latter 
introduced  a  tariff  bill  on  the  third  day  of  the  session. 

The  original  bill  was  somewhat  better  than  the  tariff  re 
visionists  had  dared  to  hope  for,  and  passed  the  House  after 
three  weeks  of  debate.  Its  content  was,  how-  The  Payne. 
ever,  unimportant,  since  the  Senate  proposed  to  Aldrich 
rewrite  it  entirely,  and  Senator  Nelson  W.  Aldrich 
kept  the  Committee  on  Finance  in  almost  continuous  ses 
sion  to  deliberate  upon  the  Senate  proposals.  The  bill  went 
to  the  Senate  on  April  9,  and  was  ready  for  debate  by  the 
end  of  the  month.  It  had  become  in  the  meantime  a  maxi 
mum  tariff  with  numerous  rates  increased  and  with  a  tariff 
board  provided  for  the  continuous  study  of  tariff  sched 
ules.  The  bill  passed  the  Senate  in  July  with  ten  insurgent 
Republicans  voting  against  it,  among  whom  Beveridge, 
Cummins,  Dolliver,  and  La  Follette  were  the  most  out 
spoken.  In  the  judgment  of  the  Outlook,  the  Senate  had 
betrayed  the  party  faith. 

Until  the  Payne-Aldrich  tariff  was  sent  to  conference  in 
July  President  Taft  refrained  from  interference  with  the 


368     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

processes  of  legislation.  His  view  of  the  powers  of  the  re 
spective  branches  of  government  Jed  him  to  abstain  from 
intervention.  He  began  to  take  a. hand  only  in  the  last 
stcprs  of  the  bill,  when  there  appeared  possible  both  a  dead 
lock  between  the  houses  and  a  failure  of  the  hope  of  down 
ward  revision.  Speaking  at  the  Yale  Commencement,  he 
asserted  that  the  country  would  hold  the  party  to  a  strict 
accountability  should  the  tariff  fail.  President  Taft  signed 
the  Payne-Aldrich  Bill  on  August  5,  1909.  When  Roose 
velt  returned  and  became  aware  of  what  had  been  done, 
he  thought  the  tariff  "better  than  the  last  [the  Dingley 
Bill]  and  considerably  better  than  the  one  before  the  last 
[Wilson  Bill]. "  In  the  closing  debate  Taft  succeeded  in  en 
larging  the  free  list  of  raw  materials,  and  the  Outlook,  one  of 
the  severest  critics  of  the  bill  in  its  early  stages,  thought  it 
in  its  final  form  "by  far  the  most  enlightened  protectionist 
measure  ever  enacted  in  the  history  of  the  country. " 

It  had  been  passed  in  the  bright  glare  of  publicity,  with 
insurgent  members  of  both  houses  pointing  out  what  they 
Income  Tax  construed  as  its  defects,  and  with  journalists 
Amendment  traineci  [n  fa  technic  of  muckraking,  exploiting 
the  iniquities  of  the  measure.  It  included  as  novelties  free 
trade  for  the  Philippines,  which  was  close  to  the  heart  of  the 
President,  and  a  tax  on  corporation  incomes.  This  latter 
measure  marked  a  stage  in  the  rehabilitation  of  Populism. 
The  Supreme  Court  decision  of  1894,  which  declared  un 
constitutional  the  income  tax  provision  of  the  Wilson  Bill, 
enraged  the  Populists,  who  believed  it  to  be  a  corrupt  de 
fense  of  privilege  and  wealth,  and  the  constitutional  amend 
ment  safeguarding  the  income  tax  became  their  immediate 
demand.  In  a  special  message  of  June  1 6  Taft  advocated  a 
tax  on  the  income  of  corporations  as  likely  to  be  regarded  as 
constitutional,  and  in  the  ensuing  debates  the  tax  was  in 
corporated,  and  a  new  amendment  to  the  constitution  was 
agreed  upon.  The  new  amendment,  proposed  on  July  12, 
1909,  received  the  requisite  consent  of  three  fourths  of 
the  States,  and  was  proclaimed  in  1913.  It  authorized 
Congress  "to  lay  and  collect  taxes  on  incomes  from  what- 


THE  PARTY  PLEDGE  369 

ever  source  derived"  and  silenced  permanently  objections 
founded  upon  limitation  in  the  taxing  power. 

The  insurgent  Senators  voted  "no"  upon  the  final  pas 
sage  of  the  tariff  bill,  and  hurried  home  to  tell  their  constit 
uents  that  the  party  pledge  had  been  violated  Rise  of 
and  that  the  tariff  was  another  victory  for  priv-  lnsurgents 
ilege.  The  discontent  that  they  voiced  and  stimulated 
was  so  pronounced  that  Taft  took  a  speaking  trip  to  defend 
the  measure  as  a  compliance  with  the  pledge.  He  trav 
eled  sixteen  thousand  miles  in  vain.  Speaking  at  \Yinona, 
Minnesota,  September  17,  he  made  a  thoroughgoing  de 
fense  of  the  bill  without  convincing  his  Western  critics. 
The  insurgent  movement  was  centered  in  the  upper  Missis 
sippi  Valley,  and  accepted  the  explanation  of  its  local  lead 
ers  rather  than  that  of  the  President.  Instead  of  satisfying 
his  audiences  that  the  tariff  was  wise  and  fair,  he  convinced 
them  that  he  had  allied  himself  with  the  "stand-pat"  group, 
and  that  Cannon  and  Aldrich,  Penrose  and  Murray  Crane, 
were  to  dominate  his  policies  instead  of  those  Republicans 
who  had  avowed  and  shown  their  zeal  for  correcting  the 
abuses  in  trade  and  politics.  The  insurgents  began  to  ask 
what  would  happen  to  the  Roosevelt  policies  with  such  a 
President. 

The  Western  speeches  of  the  President  were  not  confined 
to  tariff  matters.  Repeatedly  as  opportunity  offered  he 
renewed  his  statement  of  determination  to  carry  out  the 
policies  of  his  predecessor,  and  discussed  the  question  of 
conservation  in  its  various  aspects.  The  difference  between 
the  temper  of  Taft  and  that  of  Roosevelt  greatly  affected 
their  treatment  of  all  administrative  problems,  and  par 
ticularly  one  like  conservation  that  was  founded  thus  far 
chiefly  in  executive  judgment.  At  the  Conservation  Con 
ference  in  December,  1908,  Taft  alluded  to  the  problem  as 
lying  in  the  twilight  zone  of  federal  jurisdiction.  In  Roose 
velt's  view  the  twilight  zone  belonged  to  him,  and  he  re 
garded  himself  as  warranted  in  doing  anything  in  the  public 
interest  that  was  not  forbidden  by  some  specific  law.  His 
withdrawal  of  lands  from  entry  had  been  based  upon  his 


370     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

belief  that  they  ought  to  be  conserved  rather  than  upon  any 
stated  authority  to  conserve  them4  Taft  approached  simi 
lar  problems  and  believed  himself  excluded  from  the  twilight 
zone  except  as  Congress  directed  him  to  enter  it.  He 
searched  the  statute  books  for  laws  conferring  authority 
while  Roosevelt  searched  to  see  if  there  were  prohibitions. 
The  normal  consequence  of  such  difference  in  temper  was 
difference  in  conduct  that  showed  itself  now  that  Taft  was 
responsible  for  presidential  policies,  and  it  necessarily  made 
him  appear  to  be  allied  with  those  who  obstructed  Govern 
ment  control. 

Before  leaving  his  summer  home  at  Beverly,  Massachu 
setts,  for  his  Western  trip,  it  became  necessary  for  President 
The  Bal-  Taft  to  straighten  out  a  controversy  involving 
linger  con-  problems  of  conservation.  The  Secretary  of  the 
Interior,  Richard  A.  Ballinger,  had  served  as 
Commissioner  of  the  General  Land  Office  under  Roosevelt. 
His  policies  as  Secretary  failed  to  meet  the  expectations  of 
the  conservationists.  Gifford  Pinchot,  of  the  Forestry  Serv 
ice,  openly  attacked  him  in  the  early  summer  because  of  his 
policies  respecting  water-power  sites  and  coal  lands.  The 
controversy  involved  both  policies  and  opinions,  and  was 
the  more  difficult  to  settle  because  Pinchot  was  in  the 
Department  of  Agriculture  and  not  under  the  control  of 
Ballinger.  Only  by  the  direct  intervention  of  the  President 
could  action  be  obtained.  The  attack  on  Ballinger  was 
founded  upon  specific  charges  made  by  one  of  his  employees 
named  Glavis.  A  memorandum  prepared  for  the  President 
and  supporting  the  Secretary,  although  not  passing  judg 
ment  upon  the  merits  of  particular  claims,  was  signed  by 
Taft  in  September.  Glavis  was  dismissed  from  the  Gov 
ernment  service,  and  persuaded  his  friends  that  he  was 
made  a  victim  because  of  his  activity  in  the  public  interest. 
On  November  13,  1909,  he  published  in  Collier's  Weekly 
"The  Whitewashing  of  Ballinger." 

Before  Congress  met,  the  friends  of  conservation  were 
engaged  in  a  vigorous  attack  upon  Ballinger  as  a  servant  of 
the  trusts  and  monopolies  that  were  endeavoring  to  steal 


THE  PARTY  PLEDGE  371 

the  public  domain.  A  joint  committee  was  appointed  on 
January  26  to  investigate  the  administration  of  the  Depart 
ment  of  the  Interior.  It  ultimately  filed  a  report  upholding 
the  administration  of  the  department,  but  the  controversy 
had  grown  from  the  limited  field  of  conservation  to  the 
broader  one  of  general  politics.  Gifford  Pinchot  had  con 
tinued  his  open  attacks  upon  Ballinger  and  his  policies. 
He  carried  his  fight  until  it  involved  a  matter  of  adminis 
trative  discipline.  In  the  early  winter  he  wrote  a  letter  to 
Senator  Dolliver  in  violation  of  a  rule  forbidding  subordi 
nates  to  carry  on  direct  correspondence  with  Congress  in 
such  cases.  He  believed  the  Secretary  of  Agriculture  had 
authorized  him  to  write  the  letter,  but  when  Secretary 
Wilson  denied  having  given  the  authority  there  remained  no 
other  course  than  to  treat  it  as  a  breach  of  discipline.  Taft 
dismissed  Pinchot  on  January  7,  1910,  and  precipitated 
thereby  a  party  crisis  in  the  face  of  approaching  Congres 
sional  elections. 

So  far  as  conservation  was  concerned,  there  was  room  for 
more  than  one  opinion.  The  legal  authority  for  as  vigorous 
a  program  as  Roosevelt  had  carried  out  was  The  West 
dubious  at  best.  President  Taft  appealed  in  and  conser- 
defense  of  conservation,  with  every  appearance 
of  sincerity,  but  his  acts  failed  to  satisfy  the  conserva 
tionists,  and  the  difference  of  opinion  was  seized  upon  by 
the  insurgents  who  were  already  disposed  to  believe  that 
he  had  abandoned  the  progressive  cause  to  ally  himself  with 
the  "stand-pat."  By  1910  another  point  of  view  had  de 
veloped  with  reference  to  conservation.  In  many  respects 
the  policy  was  an  Eastern  policy  for  Western  problems. 
Local  opinion  in  the  West  had  always  favored  the  speedy 
development  of  the  public  domain.  Western  States  in 
vited  irrigation  works,  but  looked  askance  at  national 
forests  forever  removed  from  State  management  or  tax 
ation,  and  objected  to  withdrawal  of  lands  from  entry. 
The  selfish  interests  that  desired  to  appropriate  national 
resources  found  it  possible  to  stir  up  a  genuine  Western 
objection  to  a  national  policy  that  hindered  local  develop- 


372     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

ment.  Ballinger  had  the  Far  Western  point  of  view,  while 
Taft,  his  chief,  had  the  legalistic  mind.  Of  necessity  their 
conduct  in  conservation  failed  to  meet  the  expectation  of 
the  scientific  conservationists.  The  dismissal  of  Pinchot 
brought  conservation  into  the  field  of  active  politics.  Be 
fore  his  dismissal  he  had  already  written  of  the  controversy 
to  Colonel  Roosevelt  at  Khartoum,  and  in  the  early  spring 
of  1910  he  crossed  the  Atlantic  to  meet  him  at  Porto 
Maurizio  as  he  traveled  north  from  Africa.  The  friends 
of  conservation,  thinking  themselves  deceived  by  the  Ad 
ministration,  turned  to  the  ex-President,  the  founder  of 
the  movement,  for  leadership  and  comfort,  while  in  Con 
gress  the  insurgent  Republicans  as  well  as  the  Democrats 
made  the  most  of  the  Payne-Aldrich  tariff  and  the  Bal 
linger- Pinchot  controversy  as  proof  that  the  conservatives 
had  gained  control  of  the  Administration. 

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL  NOTE 

F.  A.  Ogg,  National  Progress  (1917),  gives  a  careful  narrative  of  events 
after  1907.  Other  works  of  special  interest  on  this  period  are  Frank  J. 
Goodnow,  Social  Reform  and  the  Constitution  (1911);  Nicholas  Murray 
Butler,  Why  Should  we  Change  our  Form  of  Government  (1912);  Herbert 
Croly,  The  Promise  of  American  Life  (1909) ;  and  Paul  L.  Haworth,  America 
in  Ferment  (1915).  The  writings  of  Tarbell  and  Taussig  continue  usefu\ 
upon  the  tariff.  The  insurgent  point  of  view  is  best  represented  by 
Collier's  Weekly,  1909-10.  The  report  of  the  investigating  committee  on 
the  Ballinger-Pinchot  controversy  is  printed  as  6ist  Cong.,  2d  Sess.,  Sen. 
Doc.  248. 


CHAPTER  XXXVIII 

INSURGENCY 

THE  differences  of  principle  and  the  personal  grievances 
that  had  been  suppressed  or  overridden  by  the  dominating 
personality  of  Roosevelt  broke  out  in  open  war-  insurgent 
fare  before  Taft  met  his  first  Congress.  While  revolt 
the  Committee  on  Ways  and  Means  was  drafting  its  tariff 
schedules  in  secrecy,  a  group  of  dissenters  became  openly 
insurgent  against  the  policies  of  the  party,  and  let  it  be 
known  that  there  would  be  a  test  of  strength  in  the  organ 
ization  of  the  Sixty-First  Congress.  From  this  time  until  the 
end  of  the  Administration  the  insurgents  held  the  center  of 
the  political  stage.  Most  of  their  members  came  from  the 
upper  Mississippi  Valley  with  the  States  that  had  harbored 
the  Granger  movement  now  most  active  in  revolt.  In  the 
Senate  their  leaders  had  little  chance  for  effective  action, 
since  there  were  almost  twice  as  many  Republicans  as 
Democrats  in  that  body,  and  the  votes  of  men  like  Cum 
mins,  Beveridge,  and  La  Follette  were  not  needed  to  make 
a  majority.  In  the  House,  however,  of  the  three  hundred 
and  ninety-one  members  the  Republicans  at  best  had  a 
majority  of  under  fifty,  while  the  insurgents  claimed  to 
control  between  twenty  and  thirty  votes,  and  it  was  always 
possible  that  by  uniting  with  the  Democratic  minority  they 
might  break  the  Republican 'control.  Attempts  were  made 
in  March,  1909,  to  defeat  Cannon  for  reelection,  and  these 
constituted  the  first  formal  action  of  the  insurgents. 

The  fundamental  insurgent  claim  was  that  machine  poli 
tics  had  usurped  the  control  of  the  national  parties,  and  had 
defrauded  the  people  of  the  right  of  self-govern-    Attack  on 
ment.      The  most  visible  agent  of  this  domi-    Cannon 
nance  was  the  Speaker  of  the  House  of  Representatives, 
whose  power  had  steadily  grown  more  autocratic  since 
Thomas  B.  Reed  had  led  in  the  revision  of  the  rules  in  1890. 


374     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

The  large  membership  of  the  House  and  the  short  average 
tenure  of  its  members  inherently  weakened  it  as  a  machine 
for  doing  public  business.  On  the  floor  and  in  the  commit 
tee  rooms  most  of  the  members  were  usually  new  and  in 
experienced  in  the  mechanism  of  government.  The  small 
proportion  who  had  sat  in  two  or  three  preceding  Con 
gresses  acquired  a  power  of  leadership  based  upon  knowing 
the  ropes  that  was  often  far  in  excess  of  their  right  to  leader 
ship.  The  Speaker  was  in  control  of  his  party  in  the  House. 
He  appointed  all  committees  and  these  committees  drafted 
the  rules  and  statutes  that  the  House  enacted.  He  con 
trolled  the  floor  for  purposes  of  debate,  and  by  withholding 
recognition  from  private  speakers;  or  by  collusion  as  to  who 
should  be  recognized,  he  was  able  to  silence  individuals  or 
factions.  Few  members  of  Congress  had  personal  grievances 
against  Joseph  G.  Cannon,  but  all  the  insurgent  leaders 
believed  that  his  power  was  so  exercised  as  to  prevent 
interference  with  the  legislative  policies  of  conservative 
Republicans.  The  revolt  had  been  long  impending.  A 
dozen  Republicans  voted  against  Cannon's  reelection,  and  a. 
larger  number  voted  against  the  readoption  of  the  rules  of 
the  House  that  placed  the  entire  control  of  committee  poli 
cies  in  his  hands.  In  the  ensuing  debate  over  the  Payne- 
Aldrich  tariff  the  insurgents'  grievance  over  the  mechanics 
of  party  control  was  heightened  by  their  hostility  to  the 
tariff  that  was  passed.  In  both  houses  ominous  groups 
voted  against  the  final  passage  of  the  bill.  When  the 
administrative  quarrel  between  Ballinger  and  Pinchot 
arose,  and  Taft  most  needed  the  support  and  confidence 
of  his  party,  the  insurgent  Republicans  were  indisposed  to 
grant  it. 

The  reform  program  looked  toward  a  revival  of  essential 
democracy  by  making  government  more  responsive  to  the 
Program  people.  In  the  management  of  party  conven- 
of  reforms  tions  there  had  been  personal  grievances  and 
violations  of  principle  over  a  long  term  of  years.  Candi 
dates  for  office  were  nominated  by  party  conventions, 
while  the  delegates  to  these  conventions  were  selected  in 


INSURGENCY  375 

other  conventions  or  caucuses  in  which  few  voters  partici 
pated  and  over  which  the  influence  of  the  political  boss 
could  easily  be  exerted.  It  was  natural  for  defeated  as 
pirants  to  feel  that  they  suffered  because  of  improper  ob 
structions  of  the  public  will,  and  to  regard  themselves  as 
entitled  to  more  support  than  they  received.  It  was  also 
true  that  the  managers  of  parties  and  conventions  strove 
to  have  their  business  cut  and  dried,  their  slates  framed  in 
the  interest  of  party  harmony,  and  their  own  conclusions 
ratified  without  protest.  Roosevelt  had  in  1908  helped  to 
draft  the  statement  of  party  principles  that  was  released 
for  publication  before  the  convention  that  was  to  adopt  it 
had  assembled. 

The  control  of  conventions  was  by  no  means  the  only 
grievance  of  the  insurgents.  They  declared  that  legislative 
bodies,  city  councils,  State  legislatures,  and  even  Congress 
itself,  responded  more  quickly  to  the  will  of  professional 
politicians  and  big  business  than  to  the  voice  of  the  people, 
which  they  claimed  to  represent.  Their  complaint  resem 
bled  that  of  the  Populist  Party  in  whose  early  platforms 
there  had  been  accumulated  similar  charges  of  misgovern- 
ment  as  well  as  proposals  for  fundamental  reform.  The 
initiative  and  the  referendum  were  words  that  became 
known  in  American  politics  through  the  discussions  of  the 
Populist  period.  With  the  referendum  the  United  States 
was  entirely  familiar,  since  it  habitually  submitted  consti 
tutions  and  their  amendments  to  ratification  by  popular 
vote.  These  ideas  had  been  taken  up  by  young  Republi 
can  leaders  as  the  Populists  lost  their  grip.  A  few  Western 
States  made  provision  for  initiating  laws  by  popular  action, 
as  well  as  for  calling  a  referendum  upon  legislative  acts. 
The  system  seemed  to  promise  relief  from  boss  control. 

The  tendency  of  conventions  to  override  movements  of 
protest  revived  another  mechanical  reform,  advocated  by 
Senator  La  Follette  and  his  Middle- Western  friends.  The 
direct  primary  as  a  means  of  making  nomination  for  office 
was  only  an  elaboration  of  the  principle  of  the  initiative,  but 
it  went  further  in  that  its  advocates  proposed  to  do  away 


376     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

with  the  convention  itself.  Twice  in  Wisconsin,  in  1896 
and  1898,  La  Follette  believed  thaj  conventions,  because 
of  the  corrupt  influence  of  railroad  politicians,  defrauded 
the  party  of  its  desire  to  nominate  him  for  governor.  His 
project  for  a  national  system  of  direct  primaries  for  nomi 
nating  to  all  offices  including  the  presidency,  was  advanced 
in  1897.  In  New  York  Governor  Hughes  was  fighting  for  a 
similar  reform  in  1909, 'and  numerous  States  had  extended 
their  election  laws  to  control  party  behavior  in  making 
party  nominations.  The  demand  for  a  direct  primary 
arose  from  a  situation  that  the  Nation  in  1896  described  as 
"the  product  of  thirty  years  of  government  by  intrigue, 
concealment,  and  bribery." 

Another  of  the  Populist  reforms,  the  direct  election  of 
Senators,  received  the  approval  of  the  insurgents  and  was 
advanced  by  the  election  of  a  Senator  from  Illinois  in  1909. 
William  Lorimer  was  then  elected  Senator  after  a  long 
struggle  at  Springfield  in  the  course  of  which  it  was  charged 
that  bribery  had  contributed  to  the  result.  Lorimer  was  a 
man  of  exemplary  personal  habits,  and  had  made  so  many 
strong  friendships  while  in  the  lower  house  that  the  scandal 
of  his  election  was  the  more  notorious.  The  system  itself 
not  only  made  it  possible  for  corrupt  influences  to  purchase 
an  election,  but  also  to  bring  deadlock  to  the  government 
of  a  great  State  while  its  legislature  neglected  public  affairs 
in  order  to  wrangle  over  a  Senator  at  Washington.  After 
a  long  and  bitter  investigation,  Lorimer  was  expelled;  and 
insurgent  Senators,  Bristow  and  Borah,  utilized  the  scandal 
to  urge  the  Seventeenth  Amendment  to  the  Constitution. 
The  amendment  was  proclaimed  in  1913  and  placed  the 
election  of  Senators  in  the  hands  of  the  voters  themselves. 

The  dismissal  of  Pinchot  from  the  Government  service 
and  the  resulting  investigation  of  the  Interior  Department, 
Change  in  which  was  forced  through  the  House  by  a  corn- 
House  rules  bination  of  Democratic  and  insurgent  votes,  gave 
the  cue  for  renewed,  effort  by  the  insurgents  to  control  the 
party.  Twenty-four  of  them  signed  a  public  statement 
that  the  "object  of  the  so-called  insurgent  movement  in  the 


INSURGENCY  377 

national  House  of  Representatives  is  to  bring  about  such 
a  revision  of  the  present  arbitrary  rules  under  which  the 
business  of  the  House  is  carried  on  as  will  restore  the  prin 
ciple  of  representative  government  without  interfering  with 
the  expedition  of  the  public  business."  Under  the  leader 
ship  of  George  W.  Norris,  of  Nebraska,  they  prepared  an 
amendment  to  the  House  rules,  taking  the  appointment  of 
the  Committee  on  Rules  away  from  the  Speaker,  making  it 
elective  by  the  House  itself,  and  disqualifying  the  Speaker 
from  membership  upon  it.  On  March  17,  1910,  they  sprung 
their  plot  against  Cannon,  who  exhausted  all  the  parliamen 
tary  devices  to  delay  a  roll-call;  but  after  thirty  hours  of 
continuous  debate  the  insurgent-Democratic  combination 
broke  the  power  of  the  Speaker. 

It  was  the  hope  of  the  opposition  that  it  broke  the  power 
of  the  Republicans  as  well.  For  the  first  time  since  free 
silver  split  the  Democratic  Party  was  there  a  real  hope  of 
Democratic  success.  Democrats  made  the  most  of  the  in 
ability  of  Taft  to  dominate  his  party.  They  conspired  with 
the  insurgents  and  attacked  the  Administration.  "For 
the  first  time  in  the  history  of  the  country  a  President  of 
the  United  States  has  openly  proclaimed  himself  the  friend 
of  thieves  and  the  enemy  of  honest  men,"  wrote  Henry 
Watterson  in  the  Louisville  Courier -Journal  for  the  inspi 
ration  of  his  Democratic  associates. 

With  his  own  party  debating  the  sincerity  of  his  accept 
ance  of  progressive  ideas,  President  Taft  had  difficulty  in 
guiding  a  program  of  constructive  legislation 
through  Congress.  The  revision  of  the  tariff 
was  the  only  important  work  of  his  first  session. 
In  the  winter  of  1909-10  he  called  the  attention 
of  Congress  to  the  need  for  further  railroad  regulation,  for 
additional  amendments  to  the  Sherman  Anti-Trust  Law, 
and  for  special  statutes  defining  the  power  of  the  President 
in  the  twilight  zone  of  conservation.  In  this  last  field  Con 
gress  removed  the  uncertainty  with  reference  to  the  power 
of  the  President  to  withdraw  lands  of  the  public  domain 
from  entry,  pending  final  determination  as  to  their  use. 


373     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

Roosevelt  had  acted  freely  in  this  direction  without  specific 
authority.  Taft  now  withdrew  coal  lands  until  at  the  end 
of  his  Administration  58,863,785  acres  of  these  had  been 
safeguarded  in  this  way.  The  forest  areas  were  increased. 
The  vacancy  in  the  Forestry  Service  caused  by  the  dismissal 
of  Gifford  Pinchot  was  filled  by  the  appointment  of  Henry 
S.  Graves,  head  of  the  Yale  School  of  Forestry.  The  Bu 
reau  of  Mines  was  created  in  the  Department  of  the  In 
terior  and  shortly  came  under  the  direction  of  Van  H.  Man 
ning,  and  received  new  powers  for  the  scientific  study  of 
mineral  resources. 

The  progress  made  in  the  field  of  conservation  was  par 

alleled  by  progress  toward  the  completion  of  statehood  for 

all  the  United  States.     The  admission  of  Okla- 

Admission         ,  .  i       i    ^i        r       i     i- 

of  Arizona      homa  in  1907  marked  the  final  disappearance 


and  New        from  the  map  of  the  old  Indian  Country.     At 

Mexico  .     **  J 

one  stage  in  the  proceedings  with  reference  to 
Oklahoma,  an  omnibus  bill  had  been  brought  forward  for 
the  division  of  the  Territory  into  two  States  instead  of  one, 
and  for  the  enabling  at  the  same  time  of  the  last  remaining 
Territories  of  the  American  Desert,  Arizona  and  New  Mex 
ico.  The  stubborn  opposition  of  Senator  Beveridge  to  the 
admission  of  Indian  Territory  except  as  a  single  State  held 
back  the  admission  of  any  of  the  last  group  for  several 
years.  The  people  of  Arizona  and  New  Mexico,  caught  in 
the  political  entanglement  with  which  they  had  no  concern, 
protested  in  vain,  but  procured  no  relief  until  1910.  Their 
territorial  status  had  lasted  for  fifty  years,  beginning  when 
New  Mexico  was  made  a  Territory  as  a  part  of  the  Com 
promise  of  1850.  The  slow-going  Mexican  population  of 
the  valley  of  the  Rio  Grande  showed  little  disposition  to 
expand  or  grow.  In  1863  discoveries  of  gold  near  the  Col 
orado  River  and  the  rediscovery  of  silver  mines  in  the  valley 
of  the  Santa  Cruz  brought  about  the  partition  of  New  Mex 
ico  and  the  creation  of  Arizona.  Whenever  statehood  was 
discussed  thereafter,  these  two  Territories  were  included  as 
a  part  of  the  general  problem.  The  Southern  Pacific  and 
the  Atchison,  Topeka  &  Santa  Fe  built  across  them  with- 


INSURGENCY  379 

out  greatly  affecting  their  development,  but  toward  the 
end  of  the  century  the  progress  of  irrigation  and  the  rise  of 
large-scale  mining,  in  which  numerous  company  towns  were 
established,  gave  to  Arizona  a  quickened  appearance  that 
pointed  toward  speedy  admission.  In  1910  when  they  were 
enabled,  Arizona  had  a  population  of  204,354;  New  Mexico 

of  327,301. 

Under  their  enabling  acts  the  Territories  made  rapid 
progress,  and  both  were  admitted  by  proclamation  of  the 
President  in  1912.  Arizona  was  some  weeks  later  than  New 
Mexico  because  of  interference  by  President  Taft  that  was 
interpreted  as  throwing  light  upon  his  attitude  toward 
the  progressive  movement.  Like  most  constitutional  con 
ventions,  the  Arizona  body  was  offered  all  of  the  modern 
reforms  and  accepted  many  of  them.  One  device,  the  recall 
of  judges,  aroused  in  general  more  opposition  than  any  of 
the  other  mechanical  reforms,  and  was  widely  attacked  as 
striking  at  the  independence  and  honesty  of  the  judiciary. 
President  Taft  never  forgot  his  training  as  a  judge,  and  de 
clined  to  issue  a  proclamation  certifying  the  admission  of 
Arizona  until  the  Territory  had  amended  its  projected  con 
stitution  by  excising  the  objectionable  recall  of  judges. 
Congress  supported  him  in  this  and  the  Territory  bowed  to 
the  inevitable;  but  once  admitted  it  flaunted  its  independ 
ence  of  the  President  and  Congress  by  amending  its  con 
stitution  and  restoring  the  offending  article. 

Alaska  was  given  full  territorial  organization  in   1913. 
Since  its  acquisition  in  1867  it  had  been  governed  arbitrarily 
and  had  been  in  continuous  danger  of  exploita-    Alaska 
tion.     Its  coal  lands  aroused  the  interest  of  spec-    Terntory 
ulators,  whose  attempts  to  secure  control  of  them  precipi 
tated  the  attack  upon  Ballinger.     There  was  need  for  rail 
road  development,  whose  control  was  tied  up  with  that  of 
the  natural  resources,  and  whose  execution  was  undertaken 
by  the  United  States  itself  in  the  next  Administration. 

The  program  of  railroad  legislation  included  an  extension 
of  the  poWers  of  the  Interstate  Commerce  Commission,  an 
enlargement  of  its  jurisdiction -to  include  terminals,  tele- 


380     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

graph,  telephone,  and  cable  services,  and  the  creation  of  a 
Railroad  new  federal  court  for  the  special  purpose  of  de- 
Act  of  1910  termining  appeals  arising*  from  the  orders  of  the 
Commission.  On  June  18,  1910,  Taft  signed  the  Mann- 
Elkins  Act  for  these  purposes  after  a  prolonged  debate 
between  the  insurgent  advocates  of  rigorous  control  and 
conservative  opposition  to  any  control.  Senator  Cummins, 
the  head  of  the  insurgents  in  this  matter,  with  the  support 
of  insurgent  and  Democratic  votes,  forced  the  adoption  of 
amendments  until,  in  its  final  passage,  the  bill  was  an  ac 
ceptable  compromise.  Its  commerce  court  was  a  distinct 
novelty.  Heretofore,  cases  arising  out  of  public  control 
of  the  railroads  had  been  long  drawn  out  because  of  the 
crowded  condition  of  the  judicial  docket  or  had  involved 
technical  matters  in  transportation  economics  that  many 
federal  judges  were  unfitted  to  determine.  The  new  panel 
of  circuit  judges  that  made  up  the  commerce  court  was 
expected  both  to  expedite  decisions  and  to  specialize  in 
railroad  problems.  The  long  and  short  haul  clause  of  the 
original  Interstate  Commerce  Act  was  restated  and  placed 
in  the  discretionary  control  of  the  Interstate  Commerce 
Commission.  The  bill  retained  the  progress  of  1906  and 
made  new  advances  toward  national  control. 

A  Postal  Savings  Act,  long  advocated  by  reformers  and 
included  in  the  old  Populist  program,  was  passed  in  1910, 
and  in  due  time  turned  every  post-office  into  a  savings 
bank.  The  appropriation  of  a  special  fund  for  economic 
studies  in  the  tariff  schedules  made  a  new  step  toward 
the  adoption  of  a  scientific  basis  for  tariff  legislation.  The 
debates  over  the  Taft  measures  of  1910  were  confused  by 
the  rancorous  controversy  between  the  conservative  and 
insurgent  Republicans.  Their  final  passage  was  obscured 
Return  of  by  the  fact  that  on  June  18  Theodore  Roosevelt 
Roosevelt  landed  at  New  York  to  receive  an  ovation  that 
indicated  the  strong  hold  that  he  retained  upon  the  Ameri 
can  people.  The  Roosevelt  tour  of  1909-10  began  with  a 
hunting  trip  in  eastern  Africa.  The  expedition  was  chiefly 
scientific  in  its  nature  and  was  partly  financed  by  friends  of 


INSURGENCY  381 

the  National  Museum  in  Washington,  to  which  institution 
the  trophies  were  presented  when  the  naturalists  returned. 
When  the  hunt  was  over  Roosevelt  proceeded  down  the 
Nile  to  Khartoum,  and  then  to  Cairo  and  Alexandria.  He 
crossed  to  Italy  and  paid  a  round  of  visits  at  the  courts 
of  Europe,  received  everywhere  as  the  most  distinguished 
American  citizen,  with  honors  usually  accorded  only  to 
royalty.  At  Christiania  he  delivered  his  Nobel  address, 
and  in  Paris,  Berlin,  Oxford,  and  London  spoke  upon 
politics  and  letters.  While  in  London  he  was  appointed 
special  ambassador  to  represent  the  United  States  at  the 
funeral  of  Edward  VII.  He  returned  to  Oyster  Bay  to 
receive  the  visit  of  politicians  of  all  shades  of  opinion  and 
to  hear  their  tales  of  the  events  during  his  absence. 

In  August  Colonel  Roosevelt  started  West  upon  a  speak 
ing  trip  with  his  main  objective  at  Osawatomie,  Kansas, 
where  he  had  agreed  to  speak  on  the  memory  "NewNa- 
of  John  Brown.  Here  as  elsewhere  he  avoided  tlonallsm" 
aligning  himself  against  the  Administration  or  expressing 
an  opinion  as  to  whether  it  had  upheld  his  policies,  but  he 
gave  a  name  to  the  movement  in  which  the  insurgents  were 
engaged  when  he  spoke  of  the  "New  Nationalism"  that 
must  be  brought  into  the  United  States  Government  in 
order  to  enable  it  to  cope  with  the  problems  of  industrial 
life.  He  preferred  to  find  his  legal  authority  .  >r  the  work 
in  the  existing  Constitution,  but  demanded  the  amendment 
of  the  Constitution  if  necessary.  The  antipathies  that 
conservative  Republicans  had  developed  toward  him  in 
1909  were  revived  with  increased  intensity  as  he  advocated 
fundamental  changes.  He  showed  his  power  in  September 
by  crowding  Vice-President  Sherman  out  of  the  chairman 
ship  of  the  New  York  Republican  Convention;  and  entered 
vigorously  into  the  New  York  canvass  for  Henry  L.  Stimson 
as  governor.  The  defeat  of  Stimson  in  November  was  in 
terpreted  as  the  work  of  conservatives  to  give  Roosevelt  a 
lesson,  but  was  more  intimately  a  part  of  the  Democratic 
gain  due  to  the  Republican  split. 

The  Sixty-Second  Congress,  elected  on  November  8,  1910, 


382    RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

was  under  Democratic  control  after  eight  Congresses  of 
Republican  ascendancy.  It  was  the  consequence  of  Re 
publican  collapse  rather  than  of  Democratic  leadership. 
Antagonism  to  the  Payne-Aldrich  tariff  weakened  the  Re 
publican  vote,  while  the  insurgent  controversy  gave  op 
portunity  for  individual  Democrats  to  gain  office.  Each 
faction  blamed  the  other  for  the  party  losses,  but  the 
Democrats  interpreted  their  victory  as  a  precursor  of  a 
greater  victory  in  1912.  A  renewed  interest  in  the  person 
ality  of  Democratic  leaders  was  born  and  drew  attention 
to  the  successful  governors  in  1910,  Harmon,  of  Ohio,  D]x, 
of  New  York,  and  Wilson,  of  New  Jersey. 

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL  NOTE 

Charles  R.  Van  Hise,  Conservation  of  the  Natural  Resources  of  the  United 
States  (1910),  is  a  study  in  the  basic  problems  of  conservation  by  an 
economic  geologist.  Theodore  Roosevelt,  The  New  Nationalism  (1910), 
contains  the  Osawatomie  speech  in  which  the  new  phrase  was  coined. 
Frederic  C.  Howe,  Wisconsin,  an  Experiment  in  Democracy  (1912);  and 
Charles  McCarthy,  The  Wisconsin  Ideal  (1912),  are  enthusiastic  descrip 
tions  of  the  workings  of  the  movement  in  the  Northwest,  while  some  of  its 
larger  aspects  are  covered  in  Edward  A.  Ross,  Changing  America  (1912), 
and  Walter  E.  Weyl,  The  New  Democracy  (1912).  Benjamin  DeWitt, 
The  Progressive  Movement  (1915),  gives  a  retrospect  after  the  crest  of 
insurgency  was  passed.  James  J.  Hill,  The  Highways  of  Progress  (1910), 
is  a  capitalist's  support  of  conservation.  A  valuable  report  on  campaign 
contributions  is  "Testimony  before  a  Sub-Committee  of  the  Senate  Com 
mittee  on  Privileges  and  Elections,"  published  by  the  62d  Cong.,  3d  Sess. 


CHAPTER  XXXIX 
THE  PROGRAM  OF  PEACE 

THE  progress  of  excavation  and  construction  in  the  Canal 
Zone  brought  the  Isthmus  of  Panama  into  ever  greater 
importance  as  the  geographic  center  of  American  diplo 
macy.  Roosevelt  eliminated  the  foreign  obstructions  and 
headed  off  the  possibility  of  German  rivalry  in  the  Carib 
bean.  The  work  of  excavation  was  well  advanced  when 
he  left  office  in  1909  after  reviewing  the  home-coming 
American  fleet.  His  demonstration  of  naval  power  and 
diplomatic  intention  smoothed  the  way  for  his  successor. 
Taft  found  only  those  obstructions  that  were  inherent  in 
the  engineering  problem  and  the  temper  of  the  Latin- 
American  neighbors  around  the  Caribbean.  The  Roose 
velt  policy  of  swinging  the  "big  stick"  had  warned  off 
interlopers,  but  had  increased  the  suspicion  of  the  United 
States  in  South  and  Central  America.  Both  Root  and 
Knox  had  this  suspicion  to  contend  with  as  they  sought 
to  stabilize  the  conditions  of  government  in  the  vicinity  of 
the  canal. 

Under  the  benevolent  despotism  of  Goethals  the  work  on 
the  canal  advanced  without  cessation.     The  annual  report 
showed  increasing  millions  of  yards  excavated 
in  the  Culebra  cut,  the  fills  and  spillways  for  the    and  the 


dam  at  Gatun,  and  the  monumental  locks  to 
control  the  water  level  at  either  end.  Roosevelt 
determined  the  site,  Taft  the  lock  method  of  construction. 
The  estimates  of  the  engineers  indicated  that  the  task 
would  be  completed  early  in  the  Administration  of  Taft's 
successor,  and  the  formal  date  was  finally  placed  at  Au 
gust  15,  1914,  with  a  great  world's  fair  at  San  Francisco  to 
celebrate  the  occasion  in  the  following  winter.  The  task 
was  done  on  time,  and  Goethals  was  advanced  to  the  rank 
of  major-general  as  a  reward  for  his  services,  while  his 
medical  subordinate,  Gorgas,  became  brigadier-general. 


384     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

Before  the  question  of  rewards  was  taken  up  Congress 
found  it  necessary  in  1912  to  settle  the  terms  upon  which 
the  Panama  Canal  should  be  used  by  the  commerce  of  the 
world.  The  only  restriction  upon  the  free  power  of  Con 
gress  was  the  clause  of  the  Hay-Pauncefote  Treaty  pro 
viding  that  it  should  bpojipg  pp  ^giial  terms  to  the  vessels 
of  all  nations.  The  EiUfor  the  government  of  the  canal 
was  shaped  by  those  who  desired  a  preference  for  American 
vessels,  and  was  passed  with  a  clause  exempting  American 
bottoms  from  the  tolls.  It  was  known  at  the  time  that 
Great  Britain  would  object  to  this  as  a  violation  of  equality 
of  terms,  but  the  provision  was  allowed  to  stand. 

The  neighbors  of  the  canal  continued  to  be  centers  of 
intrigue  and  of  upheaval.  Of  all  Latin-American  countries 
Latin-Amer-  tney  were  tne  most  tropical  in  character  and 
ican  possessed  the  smallest  number  of  working  white 

men.  Traffic  of  foreigners  in  railroad  conces 
sions,  mining  rights,  and  natural  resources  was  a  constant 
provocative  of  bribery  and  repudiation.  Their  resulting 
insolvency  always  invited  foreign  interventions  such  as  the 
Venezuela  blockade  of  1902.  In  1905  a  step  was  taken  by 
the  United  States  for  the  better  stability  of  one  of  them, 
Santo  Domingo,  by  the  erection  of  an  American  financial 
receivership,  and  this  idea  was  extended  toward  Nicaragua 
and  Honduras,  and  was  pressed  by  Knox  as  an  Adminis 
tration  policy.  The  principle  of  the  Platt  Amendment  was 
to  be  extended  over  Central  America  by  the  voluntary 
consent  of  the  countries  concerned.  American  bankers 
were  to  underwrite  their  debts  and  the  American  Govern 
ment  was  to  see  that  Treasury  receipts  were  honestly  col 
lected  and  expended.  The  power  of  the  United  States  was 
to  be  used  to  safeguard  them  against  invasion,  and  a  Central 
American  court  of  arbitral  justice,  agreed  to  under  the 
leadership  of  Root,  was  to  resolve  their  local  differences. 
American  warships  and  detachments  of  marines  were  often 
used  to  maintain  order  in  Nicaragua,  Honduras,  Santo 
Domingo,  and  in  Cuba  where  the  Cuban  constitution  spe 
cifically  conveyed  that  power,  In  the  winter  of  1912  Knox 


THE  PROGRAM  OF  PEACE  385 

visited  the  Caribbean  for  a  series  of  friendly  conferences 
with  the  republics  bordering  thereon.  The  Colombian 
Government  took  occasion  to  announce  that  he  would  not 
be  welcome  at  Bogota,  but  elsewhere  he  was  received  with 
a  cordiality  that  seems  to  have  had  no  effect  in  reducing 
the  amount  of  local  disturbance. 

Congress  and  the  Senate  were  reluctant  to  become  in 
volved  in  the  "dollar  diplomacy"  of  Secretary  Knox.  The 
problems  of  maintaining  peace  in  the  vicinity  of  the  canal 
were  left  to  the  next  Administration,  with  Colombia  still 
aggrieved  at  what  she  believed  to  be  the  unfriendly  inter 
vention  of  the  United  States  at  the  time  of  the  Panama 
Revolution. 

While  Knox  was  engaged  in  pressing  his  dollar  diplomacy, 
as  a  means  of  stabilizing  affairs  in  Central  America,  he  was 
carrying  on  other  negotiations  similarly  founded  Canadian 
upon  a  willingness  to  conciliate  and  a  respect  fisheries 
for  the  rights  and  interests  of  other  nations. 
The  last  of  the  important  disputes  with  England  was 
brought  to  a  friendly  settlement  by  an  arbitration  at  The 
Hague  in  1910.  This  involved  the  interpretation  of  the 
fishing  rights  originally  left  with  the  United  States  at 
the  time  of  independence  in  1783.  Ever  after  that  date 
there  was  difference  of  opinion  between  New  England,  that 
did  most  of  the  fishing,  and  Newfoundland  and  Quebec, 
off  whose  shores  the  fishing  was  done.  The  shore  rights 
in  connection  with  the  fishing  were  always  in  debate.  At 
various  times  during  the  century,  New  England  became 
aroused  by  a  belief  that  its  treatment  was  unfair.  The 
Halifax  award  of  1877  failed  to  clear  the  matter  up  and  left 
details  unsettled  until  1910.  In  the  last  weeks  of  Roose 
velt's  Administration,  it  was  agreed  to  submit  the  details  to 
an  arbitration  which  Knox  managed,  and  whose  award  was 
handed  down  in  September,  1910.  A  general  claims  con 
vention  with  Great  Britain  was  also  signed  in  order  to 
dispose  of  the  accumulated  list  of  private  claims. 

Arbitration  with  Great  Britain  was  no  longer  a  novelty, 
and  after  1908  had  special  sanction  from  the  language  of 


386    RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

the  treaty  concluded  by  Root.  Cleveland's  effort  for  a 
general  treaty  of  arbitration  was. without  success,  but 
Root  negotiated  with  James  Bryce  a  general  treaty  that 
the  Senate  finally  accepted.  In  accordance  with  this,  all 
controversies  were  to  be  submitted  to  arbitration  with  the 
usual  exception  of  matters  involving  national  honor,  or 
independence,  or  vital  interests.  From  the  standpoint  of 
strict  law  an  agreement  so  limited  had  little  binding  force, 
for  in  moments  of  international  dispute  it  is  easy  to  elevate 
any  controversy  until  it  seems  to  become  a  part  of  one  of 
these  exceptions,  but  as  an  evidence  of  friendly  feeling  and 
kindly  interest  the  agreement  had  considerable  value,  and 
described  the  practice  that  has  generally  prevailed  be 
tween  Great  Britain  and  the  United  States  for  more  than 
a  century. 

James  Bryce,  who  conducted  the  British  end  of  the  ne 
gotiation,  placed  the  relations  between  the  two  nations 
upon  a  new  plane  because  of  the  regard  in  which 
Bryce  and  he  was  held  by  Americans  of  all  classes.  Ap- 
pointed  Ambassador  in  1907,  he  had  for  nearly 
forty  years  known  more  of  America  than  most 
Americans.  His  repeated  visits  had  given  him  a  sympa 
thetic  understanding  of  the  extent,  difficulty,  and  success 
of  the  American  experiment.  Only  the  Federalist  of 
Alexander  Hamilton,  and  De  Tocqueville's  Democracy  in 
America  rank  with  the  American  Commonwealth  of  James 
Bryce,  and  each  of  these  is  more  limited  than  the  last.  For 
twenty  years  before  Bryce  came  to  Washington  as  Am 
bassador,  his  book  was  the  standard  text  upon  American 
government.  He  was  already  intimate  with  most  Ameri 
cans  of  importance,  and  his  administration  of  the  embassy 
paved  the  way  for  a  celebration  of  the  hundred  years  of 
peace  that  would  be  rounded  out  in  1914.  It  did  so  much 
to  solidify  the  cordiality  between  the  two  nations  that 
Americans  with  Irish  and  German  names,  fearful  of  too 
much  British  influence  in  American  affairs,  broke  up  meet 
ings  in  celebration  of  the  peace  with  Britain,  and  organized 
in  1912  what  they  called  the  "American  Truth  Society," 


THE  PROGRAM  OF  PEACE  387 

"to  propagate  true  Americanism"  by  preventing  an  Anglo- 
American  understanding. 

The  arbitration  agreement  with  England  had  meanwhile 
been  carried  one  step  further,  as  a  result  of  public  state 
ments  separately  made  by  President  Taft  and  Viscount 
Grey,  the  British  Foreign  Secretary,  in  which  each  declared 
his  willingness  for  a  binding  treaty  for  the  arbitration  of  all 
disputes  without  any  reservation.  In  August,  1911,  Knox 
signed  such  treaties  with  both  England  and  France,  and 
uncovered  in  the  Senate  an  unexpected  hostility  to  un 
limited  arbitration.  Roosevelt  spoke  vigorously  against 
the  principle,  and  his  old  associate,  Lodge,  brought  into  the 
Senate  the  majority  report  against  a  binding  pledge.  The 
minority  report  of  Root  agreed  with  the  position  of  Taft 
and  Knox  that  arbitration  could  have  no  national  sanction 
unless  great  nations  were  willing  to  accept  it  whether  they 
wanted  it  or  not,  and  whether  the  decisions  wrere  likely  to 
go  for  them  or  against.  All  the  anti-British  elements  in 
the  United  States  were  violent  in  their  denunciations  of 
the  treaty  as  subservient  to  England.  The  treaties  were 
so  amended  by  their  enemies  in  the  Senate  that  they  were 
allowed  to  die  by  the  President,  and  the  Roosevelt  treaty 
remained  in  force. 

International  peace  was  progressing  in  spite  of  the  re 
luctance  of  the  Senate.      The  objections  to  competitive 
armament,   and  the  reasonableness  of  arbitral 
methods,  at  least  where  other  nations  were  con-    and  the 


cerned,  were  receiving  ever  wider  attention, 
One  of  the  Carnegie  funds  was  devoted  to  the 
furtherance  of  peace,  while  its  donor  drew  up  his  plans  for 
a  temple  to  be  erected  at  The  Hague,  to  house  the  court 
that  had  been  agreed  upon  in  principle  in  1907.  The  open 
ing  of  this  building  in  1913  was  accepted  as  an  indication 
that  the  world  was  through  with  its  great  wars. 

The  interest  of  Taft  in  the  arbitration  of  international 
disputes  was  a  part  of  his  larger  interest  in  the  adminis 
tration  of  justice.  His  refusal  to  admit  Arizona  into  the 
Union  with  a  constitutional  provision  for  the  recall  of 


388     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

judges  was  another  side  of  the  same  interest.    His  appoint 
ments  to  the  federal  bengh  were  made  with  un- 
the  reor-         usual  care,  and  it  fell  to  his  lot  to  rebuild  the 
ganized  Su-     personnel  of  the  Supreme  Court.     Melville  W. 

prcrnc  v-'Ourt 

Fuller,  a  member  of  that  court  since  1888,  died 
in  1910,  which  made  it  necessary  to  appoint  a  new  Chief 
Justice.  Edward  Douglass  White,  a  member  of  the  court 
since  1894,  when  Cleveland  appointed  him  from  Louisiana, 
was  promoted  to  that  position.  A  group  of  unexpected 
vacancies  changed  the  complexion  of  the  court.  Justices 
Lurton,  Van  Devanter,  Lamar,  and  Pitney  were  added 
within  two  years,  as  well  as  Governor  Charles  E.  Hughes, 
of  New  York,  who  took  his  seat  in  October,  1910. 

While  the  reorganization  of  the  Supreme  Court  and  the 
movements  for  peaceful  relationships  were  in  process,  the 
old  question  of  reciprocity  with  Canada  came  to  the  front. 
In  January,  1911,  Taft  urged  without  avail  upon  the  last 
session  of  the  Republican  Congress  the  enactment  of  an 
agreement  for  better  trade  relations  with  Canada.  The 
project  was  in  line  with  the  relaxation  of  the  high  pro 
tective  rates,  demanded  by  insurgent  Congressmen  in  1909, 
but  it  received  the  bitter  opposition  of  many  of  them  be 
cause  its  result  would  be  to  bring  Canadian  agricultural 
products  into  more  direct  competition  with  those  origi 
nating  in  the  Northwestern  United  States.  The  session 
adjourned  without  action,  and  the  President  immediately 
summoned  the  Sixty-Second  Congress  in  special  session  to 
debate  the  project. 

Champ  Clark,  of  Missouri,  who  had  been  a  Democratic 
Congressman  for  eight  terms,  was  elected  Speaker  when  the 
Champ  House  convened,  April  4,  1911.  He  presided 
Clark  and  over  a  grOup  of  lawmakers  whose  personnel  had 

the  Demo 
cratic  been  greatly  changed  by  insurgent  contests  and 

Democratic  victory.  One  hundred  and  eighteen 
of  the  members  were  new  to  their  tasks;  about  two  thirds 
of  them  belonging  to  the  majority.  The  Democratic 
majority  of  more  than  sixty  votes  was  able  to  control  the 
proceedings  of  the  House  if  its  members  could  maintain 


THE  PROGRAM  OF  PEACE  389 

discipline  within  their  ranks.  A  new  minority  of  one  vote 
appeared  in  this  Congress  for  the  first  time  in  the  person 
of  Victor  L.  Berger,  a  Socialist  from  a  Milwaukee  district. 
In  the  Senate  the  old  Republican  majority  was  reduced  to 
so  small  a  number  that  when  Vice- President  Sherman  died 
in  October,  1912,  it  was  doubtful  whether  a  Republican 
presiding  officer  could  be  elected  to  replace  him.  It  was 
only  a  theoretical  majority  at  best,  for  thirteen  of  the 
Republican  Senators  were  insurgents  who  expected  to  be 
treated  as  Republicans  in  the  assignment  to  committees, 
but  who  reserved  their  independent  privilege  of  staying 
out  of  caucus  and  voting  with  the  Democrats  at  pleasure. 
Speaker  Clark,  with  Oscar  W.  Underwood,  of  Alabama,  as 
chairman  of  the  Committee  on  Ways  and  Means,  blocked 
out  a  party  program  of  tariff  revision,  one  schedule  at  a 
time,  and  included  the  passage  of  the  reciprocity  agreement 
with  Canada,  as  in  accord  with  the  larger  policy.  Canadian 
In  the  summer  of  1911  Congress  accepted  the  reciProcity 
reciprocal  agreement,  which  became  the  basis  of  a  general 
election  in  Canada  in  September.  The  Laurier  Govern 
ment  went  to  the  polls  in  the  Dominion,  seeking  support 
for  its  trade  policy,  and  met  an  opposition  of  Dominion 
nationalists  who  aspired  to  make  Canada  an  independent 
nation,  and  who  feared  close  contacts  with  the  United 
States.  A  letter  written  by  Taft  to  Roosevelt  in  January, 
1911,  embittered  the  debate.  "The  amount  of  Canadian 
products  we  would  take,"  he  wrote,  "would  procure  a 
current  of  business  between  Western  Canada  and  the 
United  States  that  would  make  Canada  only  an  adjunct 
of  the  United  States.  It  would  transfer  all  their  impor 
tant  business  to  Chicago  and  New  York,  with  their  bank 
credits  and  everything  else,  and  it  would  increase  greatly 
the  demand  of  Canada  for  our  manufactures.  I  see  this 
is  an  argument  against  reciprocity,  made  in  Canada,  and  I 
think  it  is  a  good  one."  The  unhappy  phrase,  "an  ad 
junct  of  the  United  States,"  inflamed  Canadian  opinion 
against  the  Laurier  Government,  overturned  it,  and  de 
feated  reciprocity.  To  the  embarrassment  of  being  forced 


390     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

to  appeal  to  Democrats  to  adopt  the  agreement  was  added 
the  chagrin  at  having  it  rejected  by  the  people  of  Canada. 
The  political  successes  of  the  Administration  of  Taft  were 
never  more  than  partially  complete.  The  failures  were 
notorious  and  disastrous. 

The  world  was  moving  toward  new  ideals  on  peace  be 
tween  1909  and  1913,  and  was  changing  its  physical  habits 
Hudson-  with  *ts  ideas.  On  September  25,  1909,  a  few 
Fulton  cele-  days  after  Taft  started  West  to  explain  the 
Payne-Aldrich  tariff  to  the  people,  the  State  of 
New  York  celebrated  with  pomp  and  ceremony  the  three 
hundredth  anniversary  of  the  arrival  of  Hendrik  Hudson, 
and  the  hundredth  anniversary  of  the  work  of  Robert  Fulton. 
The  tiny  replica  of  the  Half  Moon  and  the  reproduction 
of  the  clumsy  Clermont  called  attention  to  the  changes  of 
one  century  and  three.  The  naval  review,  in  which  great 
European  powers  participated  with  the  United  States,  re 
vealed  the  revolutionary  influence  of  steam  and  steel  upon 
the  course  of  naval  war,  while  the  attention  of  the  observers 
was  shifted  from  the  earth  and  its  waters  to  the  air,  as  Wil 
bur  Wright  circled  the  Statue  of  Liberty  in  his  airplane. 

Aviation  was  still  a  novelty  that  turned  men's  heads  to 

gape  in  admiration  at  a  passing  plane.     For  generations 

its  experimenters  had  struggled  with  ridicule  and 

Mechanical       .  .       .  , 

and  scien-  ignorance  in  its  advancement,  and  many  had 
ress  pr°g  ^a^  down  their  lives  in  its  service.  In  1903 
Orville  and  Wilbur  Wright,  working  together, 
made  their  earliest  flights  in  power-driven  planes.  The 
gasoline  engine  made  possible  the  attainment  of  success. 
In  the  next  six  years  their  mastery  of  the  air  was  increased, 
and  imitators  multiplied  by  hundreds  throughout  the  world. 
In  July,  1909,  Orville  Wright  performed  tests  for  endurance 
and  distance  exacted  by  the  War  Department  before  the 
acceptance  of  its  first  signal  corps  airplane.  For  one  hour, 
nine  minutes,  and  thirty-one  seconds  he  circled  above  Wash 
ington  carrying  a  passenger  with  him  in  his  biplane.  Two 
days  earlier  a  Frenchman,  Louis  Bleriot,  flew  his  monoplane 
across  the  English  Channel  to  the  cliffs  at  Dover,  while  in 


THE  PROGRAM  OF  PEACE  391 

Germany  Count  Zeppelin's  third  dirigible  made  its  course 
from  Friedrichshafen  to  Berlin  in  August.  The  conquest  of 
the  air  was  not  yet  complete,  but  it  was  well  begun. 

Earlier  in  the  year  1909  the  world  had  had  a  signal  dem 
onstration  of  the  achievements  of  science.  At  daybreak  on 
January  23  the  White  Star  steamship,  Republic,  outbound 
from  New  York,  was  rammed  when  off  Nantucket  light 
ship  by  a  tramp  freighter.  From  his  wireless  cabin  Jack 
Binns,  the  wireless  operator,  sent  out  his  CQD  signal  of 
distress,  which  was  picked  up  at  a  distance  by  the  Baltic, 
Lucania,  and  La  Lorraine,  with  the  result  that  although 
the  Republic  foundered  in  her  distress,  her  passengers  were 
saved.  Three  years  later,  in  April,  1912,  another  demon 
stration  of  the  imperative  need  for  wireless  at  sea  started  a 
train  of  laws  that  made  it  compulsory  for  ocean-going  vessels 
to  carry  the  new  tool.  The  Titanic,  fresh  from  her  builders' 
hands  and  the  largest  vessel  in  the  world,  rammed  an  iceberg 
on  her  maiden  voyage,  and  sank,  carrying  with  her  nearly 
fifteen  hundred  passengers  and  crew.  The  survivors,  drift 
ing  in  their  lifeboats  and  on  their  rafts,  were  rescued  by 
the  Carpathiat  that  had  picked  up  the  signal  of  distress 
fifty-six  miles  away,  and  pushed  at  top  speed  through  the 
floes  of  ice  toward  the  scene  of  the  accident. 

Among  the  spectators  of  the  Hudson-Fulton  celebration, 
none  attracted  more  attention  than  Commodore  Robert  E. 
Peary  on  the  bridge  of  his  yacht  Roosevelt,  and  fresh  from 
his  discovery  of  the  North  Pole  on  April  6,  1909.  He,  too, 
had  terminated  a  long  and  gallant  struggle  for  a  sporting 
chance.  His  glory  was  dimmed  by  the  fact  that  another 
American  explorer  was  claiming  to  have  reached  the  Pole 
a  year  earlier  on  April  21,  1908.  The  discovery  of  the  hid 
den  places  of  the  world  was  nearly  over;  on  December  16, 
1911,  Captain  Roald  Amundsen,  a  Norwegian,  reached  the 
South  Pole  in  the  heart  of  the  Antarctic  highlands. 

The  steamboat,  airplane,  and  wireless  had  conquered  the 
water  and  the  air.  The  motor  car  was  changing  the  charac 
ter  of  transportation,  life,  and  business  on  the  land.  At  the 
end  of  Taft's  Administration  nearly  a  million  and  a  quarter 


392    RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

motor  cars  were  registered  in  the  United  States.  Ninety 
per  cent  of  them  were  gasoline  pleasure  craft  and  their 
average  cost  was  under  one  thousand  dollars.  The  automo 
bile  had  made  its  appearance  in  the  closing  years  of  the 
last  century.  There  were  under  a  thousand  in  the  United 
States  in  1900.  The  development  of  the  pneumatic  tire 
by  the  bicycle  industry  of  the  preceding  decade  had  made  it 
possible  for  the  horseless  carriage  to  travel  smoothly  and 
safely  over  the  highways.  The  study  of  the  gasoline  engine 
that  automobile  manufacturing  entailed  made  aviation  pos 
sible.  From  a  status  as  a  toy  or  as  an  extravagance,  the 
motor  car  in  1909  was  becoming  a  commonplace  utility. 
The  horse  retained  his  place  to  draw  the  carriage  upon  state 
occasions  until  the  end  of  Taft's  Administration,  but  the 
White  House  stables  were  filled  with  touring  cars  before  the 
carriages  were  relegated  to  obscurity. 

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL  NOTE 

In  addition  to  the  illustrated  and  technical  articles  to  be  found  in  the 
National  Geographic  Magazine  and  the  American  Journal  of  International 
Law,  the  following  books  on  diplomatic  themes  are  of  use:  Carl  Russell 
Fish,  American  Diplomacy  (1915);  Henry  Cabot  Lodge,  One  Hundred 
Years  of  Peace  (1913);  George  L.  Beer,  The  English-Speaking  Peoples 
(1917);  William  Howard  Taft,  The  United  States  and  Peace  (1914);  Albert 
Bushnell  Hart,  The  Monne  Doctrine,  an  Interpretation  (1916);  and  M.  W. 
Williams,  Anglo-American  Isthmian  Diplomacy,  1815-1915  (1916).  James 
Bryce  published  South  America,  Observations  and  Impressions  (1912),  and 
University  and  Historical  Addresses  (1913).  Robert  E.  Peary,  The  North 
Pole,  its  Discovery  in  1909  (1910),  is  a  standard  work.  The  illustrated 
papers  published  much  material  in  connection  with  the  Hudson-Fulton 
celebration  that  serves  to  illustrate  the  advances  in  science  and  mechanics. 


CHAPTER  XL 
THE  CAMPAIGN  OF  IQI2 

THE  National  Progressive  Republican  League  was  organized 
on  January  23,  1911,  with  Jonathan  Bourne,  of  Oregon,  as 
president.      Its  program   included   a  group   of    The  Na- 
mechanical  reforms  made  necessary,  its  leaders    t[ona}  Pr°- 

gressive  Re- 

declared,  because,  popular  government  in  publican 
America  has  been  thwarted,  and  progressive  easue 
legislation  strangled,"  by  corrupt  interests  which  "dictate 
nominations  and  platforms,  elect  administrations,  legis 
latures,  representatives  in  Congress,  and  United  States 
Senators,  and  control  cabinet  officers."  The  reforms  ad 
vocated  by  the  league  began  with  the  demand  for  the  direct 
elections  of  United  States  Senators,  direct  election  of  dele 
gates  to  national  conventions,  and  direct  primaries  for  the 
nomination  of  elective  officers.  The  initiative,  referendum, 
and  recall  were  included  in  the  list  as  suitable  for  State 
enactment,  as  well  as  a  corrupt  practices  act.  The  move- 
nv  nt  thus  crystallized  in  a  formal  organization  was'  the  out 
come  of  the  experiences  of  the  insurgents  in  their  controversy 
in  1909  and  1910.  Its  immediate  aim  was  to  capture  the 
control  of  the  Republican  Party  machinery,  to  defeat  the 
renomination  of  Taft  in  1912,  and  to  nominate  and  elect  a 
Progressive  Republican. 

The  Republican  split  presaged  by  the  formation  of  the 
Progressive  League  followed  an  old  line  of  cleavage.     Roose 
velt  contended  with  the  tendency  throughout    Taft  and 
his  presidency,  and  until  1904  conducted  himself    party  split 
as  though   he  expected  to  become  the    leader  of  reform. 
The  schism  was  founded  upon  a  belief,  widespread  and 
genuine,  that  the  people  were  losing  control  of  their  gov 
ernment,  and  it  was  accentuated  by  personal  ambition. 
The  selection  of  Taft  by  Roosevelt  as  his  heir-apparent  was 
resented  by  other  leaders  who  were  thus  debarred  from 


394    RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

their  chance  to  enter  contests  for  the  nomination,  and  who 
believed  that  their  devotion  to. good  government  was  as 
sound  as  his.  The  leaders  of  this  group  looked  on  without 
regret  when  Taft  showed  himself  unable  to  dominate  the 
political  situation  as  Roosevelt  had  done.  Their  experi 
ence  with  patronage  showed  them  his  weakness  as  a  party 
disciplinarian.  He  withheld  appointments  from  the  insur 
gent.  Congressmen  and  then  restored  them;  and  wavered  in 
his  statements  as  to  whether  he  regarded  them  as  within 
the  party  or  outside. 

After  the  defeat  of  1910  the  Democrats  made  haste  to 
consolidate  their  victory  and  Taft  failed  to  narrow  the  Re 
publican  split.  He  suffered  acute  rebuffs  upon  Canadian 
reciprocity  and  British  arbitration,  while  the  single  sched 
ule  tariff  bills  of  the  Underwood-La  Follette  combination 
caused  him  constant  embarrassment.  The  Sixty-Second 
Congress,  called  in  1911  to  pass  the  reciprocity  agreement, 
remained  in  session  to  legislate  upon  the  tariff.  The  pur 
pose  was  not  to  make  a  new  tariff,  but  to  make  trouble  for 
Taft  A  revision  of  the  notorious  Schedule  K  of  the  Payne- 
Aldrich  Act  was  passed  by  a  combination  of  Democrats  and 
insurgents,  and  was  vetoed  by  Taft  on  August  17.  "Much 
has  been  made  of  La  Follette's  offhand  statement  that  it 
was  put  together  with  'blacksmith's  tools,'"  commented  the 
Nation  upon  it.  "But  they  are  better  than  the  burglar's 
tools  with  something  very  like  which  the  woolen  schedule 
was  got  into  the  Payne-Aldrich  act."  A  farmer's  free-list 
bill  was  vetoed  on  the  following  day  and  a  cotton  bill  a  little 
later.  By  these  maneuvers  Taft  was  forced  into  the  position 
of  advocating  a  "stand-pat"  tariff  policy  against  the  pro 
gressive  efforts  of  both  Progressives  and  Democrats. 

In  the  autumn  of  1911  the  Progressive  Republican 
League  held  a  conference  at  Chicago  where  it  endorsed  the 
La  Follette  candidacy  of  La  Follette  for  the  nomination  as 
and  the  President  in  1912,  and  in  the  closing  months 

nomination          r     .  .,  i        T->  •  1^*11 

of  the  year  the  Progressive  revolt  gained  such 
weight  that  it  ceased  to  be  a  forlorn  insurrection  and  gave 
promise  of  becoming  revolution  and  victory.  Through  the 


THE  CAMPAIGN  OF  1912  395 

winter  of  1912  Republicans  who  had  remained  indifferent 
to  Progressivism  reached  the  conclusion  that  Taft  could  not 
be  reflected.  They  reached  the  conclusion  also  that  Sena 
tor  La  Toilette's  Progressive  leadership  was  local  in  charac-  / 
ter,  and  lacked  the  persuasiveness  necessary  in  a  winning 
candidate.  They  wished  to  win  and  as  Progressivism  prom 
ised  possible  victory,  they  wished  a  different  leader.  ' '  Good 
judges  of  political  situations  were  announcing  it  as  their 
deliberate  conviction  that  La  Follette  had  a  fair  chance  of 
getting  the  republican  nomination,"  wrote  Herbert  Quick. 
On  February  2,  1912,  La  Follette  spoke  at  a  public  meeting 
in  Philadelphia.  His  physical  condition  was  such  as  to 
suggest  to  his  hearers  that  a  nervous  collapse  impended, 
and  his  enemies  gave  it  wide  publicity.  Many  of  the  Pro 
gressives  seized  the  occasion  to  follow  Gifford  Pinchot  and 
other  La  Follette  supporters,  and  abandoned  La  Follette 
in  the  hope  of  influencing  Theodore  Roosevelt  to  reenter 
politics  and  contest  the  nomination. 

During  February,  1912,  the  pressure  upon  Colonel  Roose 
velt  increased.  The  Chicago  Tribune  led  in  organizing  the 
demand  that  he  become  a  candidate  for  a  third  Roosevelt 
term.  Political  friends  who  saw  no  way  of  win-  agam 
ning  except  with  him  as  candidate,  urged  him  to  resume  the 
party  leadership.  Seven  Republican  governors  wrote  him  a 
letter  urging  him  to  become  a  candidate.  On  February  24 
he  yielded  to  the  pressure  and  in  reply  to  the  appeal  of 
the  seven  governors  announced  his  intention  to  enter  the 
contest  and  remain  there  until  the  end.  He  had  become 
convinced  that  Taft  had  fallen  into  the  hands  of  the  con 
servative  Republicans,  and  that  his  policies  could  be  saved 
only  by  himself.  A  few  days  before  formally  entering  the 
contest  he  discussed  the  fundamental  reforms  in  govern 
ment  before  the  Ohio  Constitutional  Convention. 

A  flood  of  denunciation  greeted  the  return  of  Roosevelt. 
His  old  Republican  enemies,  who  had  fought  him  as  Presi 
dent,  and  were  enraged  at  his  advocacy  of  the  "new  na 
tionalism,"  denounced  him  as  a  revolutionist,  as  carried 
away  by  ambition,  and  as  desiring  to  get  into  the  White 


396     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

House  for  life.  " Occasionally,"  he  commented  upon  this 
attack,  "my  more  gloomy  foes  have  said  that  I  wanted  to 
be  a  king.  I  wanted  to  answer  th^m  that  they  did  not  know 
kings  as  I  did.  Now,  I  like  those  kings,  but  I  don't  want 
to  be  one  because  the  function  of  a  modern  constitutional 
king  .  .  .  would  be  the  function  of  a  life  vice-president  with 
the  leadership  of  the  four  hundred  thrown  in.  And  I  think 
that  there  are  other  jobs  that  a  full-sized  man  would  pre 
fer."  The  third  term  tradition  was  brought  into  the  dis 
cussion  to  discredit  the  candidate.  His  own  declaration  of 
1904,  as  well  as  the  unwritten  law  that  had  prevailed  since 
the  days  of  Washington,  were  cited  against  him.  He  brushed 
these  objections  away  by  alluding  to  a  breakfast-table 
episode.  ''When  I  say  that  I  do  not  wish  a  third  cup  of 
coffee,  it  does  not  mean  that  I  shall  never  want  another 
cup." 

The  bitterness  of  conservative  Republicans  was  more 
than  matched  by  that  of  Senator  La  Follette,  sore  at  the 
Fight  for  desertion  he  had  suffered,  believing  that  Roose- 
convention  Velt  was  treacherously  seizing  his  position,  and 

delegates  _>        J 

convinced  that  Roosevelt  s  Progressivism  was 
only  one  of  words.  In  the  contest  for  delegates  that  ensued, 
the  great  debate  lay  between  the  supporters  of  the  renomi- 
nation  of  Taft  and  the  advocates  of  Roosevelt,  while  a  small 
but  irreconcilable  La  Follette  group  pursued  them  both. 

The  Republican  National  Committee  had  called  the  con 
vention  before  the  Roosevelt  candidacy  was  launched. 
The  Southern  delegates  as  usual  were  being  chosen  under 
Administration  auspices,  while  in  States  where  conservative 
Republicans  controlled,  the  delegations  were  instructed  to 
vote  for  Taft.  In  a  period  of  less  than  four  months  Roose 
velt  strove  to  overturn  the  political  habits  of  a  generation, 
and  used  as  his  principal  lever  the  demand  for  a  direct 
primary,  that  the  people  might  rule.  He  denounced  the 
convention  system  as  a  mechanism  of  the  bosses,  and  the 
Southern  delegations  as  corrupt.  Like  Andrew  Jackson,  in 
1824,  he  demanded  a  reform  in  order  to  let  his  supporters 
attain  their  will.  As  Jackson  had  then  broken  up  the  caucus 


THE  CAMPAIGN  OF  1912  397 

system,  so  Roosevelt  and  his  supporters  tried  to  destroy 
the  convention  system.  His  claim  that  the  voters  were  with 
him  if  the  leaders  were  not,  was  borne  out  in  those  States 
where  preference  primaries  existed  or  were  adopted  by 
special  legislative  sessions  at  his  demand.  In  Illinois  in 
April  he  swept  the  State,  as  he  did  Pennsylvania  a  little 
later.  His  ringing  appeals  for  honest  popular  government 
drowned  the  utterances  of  the  other  candidates.  In  the 
Southern  States,  where  the  Administration  controlled  all  of 
the  party  machinery,  his  friends  organized  irregular  con 
testing  delegations  for  what  Frank  A.  Munsey  called  the 
"moral  effect." 

The  Republican  National  Committee  met  in  Chicago  on 
June  6,  twelve  days  ahead  of  the  meeting  of  the  convention, 
in  order  to  prepare  the  preliminary  roll,   and 
hear  the  contests  upon  more  than  two  hundred    tional 


and  fifty  delegates.  Of  the  1078  delegates  on 
the  list,  Roosevelt  possessed  411  instructed  for 
him  and  uncontested.  Of  the  rest  about  250  were  for  other 
candidates,  Taft,  La  Follette,  or  Cummins  without  contest, 
and  the  same  number  claimed  for  Taft  were  contested  by 
Roosevelt  delegations.  With  less  than  a  majority  of  all 
the  delegates  the  only  hope  of  securing  the  nomination  lay 
in  inducing  the  convention  to  rule  out  the  votes  of  all  con 
testing  delegates  upon  preliminary  organization.  In  spite 
of  the  fact  that  many  of  the  contests  were  frivolous  in  char 
acter,  all  of  them  were  pressed  with  vigor.  As  the  Na 
tional  Committee  filed  its  preliminary  opinion  on  them, 
and  listed  Taft  delegates  on  the  temporary  roll,  Roosevelt 
hastened  to  Chicago  in  person  to  conduct  his  fight.  He 
arrived  there  on  the  Saturday  before  the  convention  met 
and  immediately  spoke  from  the  balcony  of  the  Congress 
Hotel  to  an  enthusiastic  crowd  that  blocked  Michigan 
Avenue,  denouncing  the  quashing  of  his  contests  as  "naked 
theft"  on  the  part  of  the  National  Committee. 

The  leading  members  of  the  National  Committee  con 
trolled  the  machinery  of  the  convention  and  were  too  old 
at  politics  to  be  intimidated.  They  had  determined  to 


398     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

nominate  Taft  whether  the  party  wished  him  or  not,  and 
Taft  and         this  they  did,  driving  the  " steam  roller"  of  the 

cu»  * 

organization  over  all  obstructions  amid  the 
derisive  hoots  of  the  contesting  faction.  Following  its 
ancient  practice,  the  convention  permitted  delegations 
seated  by  the  National  Committee  to  vote,  whether  con 
tested  or  not.  Elihu  Root  was  elected  chairman  of  the  con 
vention,  Taft  and  Sherman  were  renominated,  and  the  party 
platform  was  written  by  conservative  Republicans.  The 
Roosevelt  delegates  sat  silent  on  the  final  roll-calls,  and 
when  the  convention  adjourned  conferred  with  their  leader 
in  a  mass  meeting  at  which  they  decided  to  return  to  their 
homes,  consult  their  constituents,  and  come  back  to  Chi 
cago  in  another  national  convention  in  August,  there  to 
organize  a  new  Progressive  Party. 

The  Democratic  Party  Convention  met  in  Baltimore  on 
June  25,  1912,  exhilarated  by  the  vision  of  success  opened 
The  ^0  them  by  the  Republican  split  in  Chicago. 

Democratic     Their  leaders  in  the  House  of  Representatives 

Convention      ,       ,  .  ..... 

had  spent  two  years  in  preparing  their  majority 
to  receive  such  an  opportunity.  One  of  them,  Champ 
Clark,  the  Speaker,  was  supported  by  half  the  delegates, 
but  the  old  Democratic  rule  of  two  thirds  for  a  nomination 
made  his  selection  anything  but  certain.  The  party  was  no 
longer  the  group  of  disorganized  factions  that  had  contested 
the  last  three  presidential  elections.  Clark  and  Underwood 
had  shown  themselves  skillful  party  leaders,  and  the  re 
action  in  1910  had  strengthened  the  group  of  Democratic 
governors.  Four  of  these  were  seriously  considered  as  can 
didates.  Folk,  of  Missouri,  had  earned  his  position  as  a 
prosecutor  of  fraud  and  corruption.  Harmon,  of  Ohio, 
shared  with  Taft  the  distinction  of  early  opposition  to 
trusts.  Marshall,  of  Indiana,  had  reestablished  Democratic 
control  in  a  doubtful  State,  and  was  devoting  himself  to  the 
modernizing  of  an  outgrown  constitution.  Wilson,  in  New 
Jersey,  two  years  removed  from  the  presidency  of  Prince 
ton,  was  the  strongest  of  the  group. 

Woodrow  Wilson,  Virginian  by  birth,  was  one  of  the  most 


THE  CAMPAIGN  OF  IQI2 

distinguished  graduates  of  Princeton  when  he  assumed  its 
presidency  in  1902.  In  his  student  years  he  be-  Woodrow 
longed  to  the  group  of  brilliant  young  men  drawn  Wllson 
to  Johns  Hopkins  to  study  history  and  politics.  His 
doctor's  thesis  on  Congressional  Government  was  nearly 
contemporary  with  Bryce's  American  Commonwealth,  and 
ranked  with  it  in  penetration  and  insight.  Through  the 
nineties  he  was  one  of  the  notable  lecturers  at  Princeton, 
and  one  of  the  most  widely  quoted  historical  essayists  of 
the  United  States.  A  university,  in  his  view,  was  a  "place 
where  ideals  are  kept  in  heart,  in  an  air  they  can  breathe; 
but  no  fools'  paradise.  A  place  where  to  learn  the  truth 
about  the  past  and  hold  debate  about  the  affairs  of  the 
present,  with  knowledge  and  without  passion."  As  presi 
dent  of  Princeton  his  struggle  to  democratize  college  life 
destroyed  the  effectiveness  of  his  leadership.  The  unwill 
ingness  of -the  institution  and  its  alumni  to  be  reshaped 
defeated  him,  but  the  world  outside  became  conscious  of 
a  new  expression  of  the  ideals  of  democracy.  George 
Harvey,  editor  of  Harper's  Weekly,  thought  he  found  in 
Wilson  the  hope  of  the  Democratic  Party,  one  who  could 
inspire  with  new  ideals  and  be  free  from  the  heresies  of 
Bryan. 

In  1910,  beaten  at  Princeton,  and  ready  to  resign  on  aca 
demic  grounds,  Wilson  accepted  the  Democratic  nomina 
tion  for  governor  of  New  Jersey  and  was  elected.  He 
plunged  immediately  into  a  partisan  contest  in  the  politics 
of  his  State,  and  proved  a  devotion  to  the  principle  of  ma 
jority  rule  by  holding  his  party  to  the  preference  it  had  ex 
pressed  in  a  senatorial  primary  for  James  Martine  for  Sen 
ator.  If  the  party  had  anticipated  the  complete  victory 
it  secured,  Martine  could  not  have  gained  the  preference 
vote ;  and  practical  leaders  wished  to  throw  him  over  after 
the  unexpected  success.  The  stubborn  insistence  of  Gov 
ernor  Wilson  that  the  party  leaders  must  play  the  game 
fairly  resulted  in  the  election  of  Martine  and  the  wider 
advertisement  of  the  fact  that  a  new  personality  was 
emerging  in  Democratic  politics.  A  series  of  anti-trust 


400     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

laws  put  through  the  New  Jersey  Legislature  at  his  instance 
indicated  his  acceptance  of  the  general  progressive  doctrine. 

William  Jennings  Bryan  was  the  most  prominent  figure 
in  the  Baltimore  Convention,  but  was  not  a  candidate.  The 
real  leader  of  his  party,  he  espoused  no  candidate,  but  ob 
structed  the  nomination  of  any  one  whose  two-thirds  ma 
jority  would  have  to  include  the  votes  of  the  New  York 
delegation.  He  insisted  that  the  party  nominate  some  one 
entirely  free  from  the  taint  of  Tammany  support.  Through 
forty-five  ballots  the  convention  struggled  in  its  endeavor 
to  make  a  nomination.  The  majority  of  Clark  could  not 
be  made  two  thirds  without  Tammany.  The  favorite 
sons  weakened  one  by  one  until  on  the  forty-sixth  ballot 
Woodrow  Wilson  was  nominated  for  the  presidency.  Gov 
ernor  Thomas  R.  Marshall,  of  Indiana,  became  his  com 
panion  on  the  ticket. 

In  the  early  days  of  August  the  bull  moose,  as  the  emblem 
of  the  Progressive  Party,  was  added  to  the  elephant  of  the 
G.O.P.  and  the  Democratic  donkey.  At  an 
gressivT"  enthusiastic  convention  in  Chicago,  that  re- 
Party  and  called  the  nervous  excitement  of  the  canvass  of 

Roosevelt 

1840  and  the  devotional  intensity  of  the  Popu 
lists  in  Cincinnati  in  1891,  the  Progressives  nominated  The 
odore  Roosevelt  and  Governor  Hiram  Johnson,  of  Cali 
fornia,  to  the  tune  of  "Onward,  Christian  Soldiers."  Their 
platform  included  the  reforms  that  the  insurgents  had  made 
popular  as  well  as  a  long  list  of  other  reforms  whose  advo 
cates  had  seen  no  chance  for  success.  The  program  was 
one  of  social  betterment  to  be  attained  by  an  improved 
political  machine  responsive  to  the  people.  Social  workers 
like  Jane  Addams,  who  had  struggled  against  the  forces  of 
vicious  politics  in  behalf  of  the  less  fortunate  members  of 
society,  saw  in  the  new  party  an  avenue  to  the  promised 
land.  Militant  fighters  of  corporations  like  Hiram  John 
son  brought  their  party  methods  to  its  support.  Woman 
suffrage  was  advocated  and  the  attempt  was  made  to  gain 
the  votes  of  women  wherever  these  were  counted.  The  new 
party  included,  in  addition  to  its  professional  political  lead- 


THE  CAMPAIGN  OF  1912  401 

ers  and  its  share  of  the  time-servers  in  politics,  "a  brave 
band  of  reformers  who  do  not  think  in  terms  of  practical 
political  organization,  but  who  regarded  the  progressive 
party  as  humanity's  cause,  and  were  for  it  without  end, 
whether  it  were  big  enough  to  be  political  or  small  enough  to 
be  negligible."  And  around  its  margin  hovered  the  im 
practicable  group  whom  Roosevelt  jovially  described  as  the 
"lunatic  fringe." 

The  remnants  of  the  Populist  Party  held  a  meeting  in  St. 
Louis  a  week  after  the  Progressive  Convention.  The  local 
reporter  observed  that  they  had  changed  from  the  Populists 
of  twenty  years  before.  They  made  no  nominees,  for  their 
work  was  done.  Most  of  their  original  planks  were  either 
incorporated  in  the  platform  of  the  new  party  or  already 
accepted  by  the  older  organizations. 

The  canvass  of  1912  was  less  bitter  than  the  pre-con- 
vention  struggle  had  been.  The  three  personalities  before 
the  public  were  such  as  to  permit  few  personal  attacks. 
The  noisy  and  confident  appeal  of  the  Progressives  met 
with  wide  sympathy  in  both  parties,  for  the  trend  of  a  dec 
ade  had  been  to  convince  the  bulk  of  the  voters  that  the 
United  States  needed  a  less  reactionary  program  than  the 
Republican  machine  could  offer.  Taft  was  in  general  held 
in  high  personal  esteem,  but  it  was  believed  that  his  political 
associates  were  undesirable.  Progressive-minded  voters 
cast  their  ballots  in  November  for  much  the  same  reasons 
that  had  prevailed  in  1908.  They  were  forced  to  guess 
whether  the  progressive  principles  would  stand  a  better 
chance  with  Roosevelt  or  with  Wilson.  In  1908  it  had  been 
Taft  or  Bryan.  The  charge  of  the  Progressive  Party  that 
the  Republican  National  Committee  had  stolen  the  nomina 
tion  for  Taft  affected  only  those  voters  who  had  already 
determined  how  to  vote.  The  charge  of  Roosevelt  that 
Taft  had  bitten  the  hand  that  fed  him  had  no  more  effect. 
In  October  the  canvass  nearly  ended  in  tragedy  when  an 
attempt  was  made  to  assassinate  Roosevelt  in  Milwaukee. 
His  rivals  stopped  their  contest  until  he  was  convalescent 
and  able  to  reenter  the  struggle. 


402    RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

When  the  votes  were  counted  it  was  made  clear  that 
Roosevelt  had  conducted  the  most  successful  of  all  third- 
Democratic  party  struggles.  With  a  new  party  organiza- 
victory  tion  hurriedly  thrown  together  in  the  heat  of 

the  engagement  he  polled  over  four  million  votes,  and  ran 
well  ahead  of  the  regular  Republican  candidate.  The  di 
vision  of  the  Republican  strength,  however,  had  its  nat 
ural  consequence.  For  the  third  time  since  the  Civil  War 
Republican  dissension  elected  a  Democratic  President. 
The  combined  Republican  and  Progressive  vote  was 
7,500,000  against  6,291,000  for  Wilson.  With  fewer  votes 
than  Bryan  received  each  time  he  was  defeated,  Woodrow 
Wilson  was  elected  as  a  minority  President.  Taft  and 
Nicholas  Murray  Butler  —  for  Sherman  had  died  during 
the  canvass  and  a  new  vice-presidential  nomination  had 
been  made  by  the  National  Committee  —  received  the  elec 
toral  vote  of  only  two  States,  Utah  and  Vermont. 

Eugene  V.  Debs,  who  ran  for  the  presidency  on  the  So 
cialist  ticket,  as  he  had  done  since  1900,  received  897,000 
votes.  These  were  variously  interpreted  as  evidence  of 
a  rising  tide  of  socialism  or  as  the  result  of  the  inability  of 
voters  to  decide  which  of  che  more  important  leaders  to 
support.  In  the  Mugwump  campaign  in  1884  voters  dis 
gusted  with  both  Cleveland  and  Blaine  voted  the  Prohibi 
tion  ticket.  Now  many  similar  votes  were  counted  for  Debs. 

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL  NOTE 

William  J.  Bryan  described  the  national  conventions  in  A  Tale  of  Two 
Conventions  (1912),  and  all  of  the  weekly  papers  gave  much  space  to  the 
contest.  Collier's  Weekly,  closely  identified  with  the  Progressive  move 
ment,  wavered  during  the  canvass  between  Roosevelt  and  Wilson,  and 
when  its  proprietors  determined  to  come  out  for  the  former,  its  editor, 
Norman  Hapgood,  gave  up  his  chair.  La  Follettes  Weekly  presents  the 
point  of  view  of  Progressives  who  felt  themselves  betrayed  by  the  turn  of 
events,  as  does  Robert  M.  La  Follette,  Autobiography  (1913).  George 
Haven  Putnam,  Memories  of  a  Publisher  (1915),  gives  a  brief  account  of  the 
Wilson  movement  in  1912.  Fred  E.  Haynes,  Third  Party  Movements  since 
the  Civil  War,  with  Special  Reference  to  Iowa  (1916),  is  a  convenient  sum 
mary  of  the  antecedents  of  Progressivism.  A  recent  autobiography  is 
Champ  Clark,  My  Quarter  Century  of  American  Politics  (1920). 


CHAPTER  XLI 
WOODROW  WILSON 

WOODROW  WILSON,  elected  .to  the  presidency  in  1912  by 
default,  was  neither  the  deliberate  choice  of  the  people  nor 
the  political  leader  of  his  party.  He  was  a  A  minority 
minority  President,  successful  only  because  the  President 
majority  party  was  nullifying  its  own  effort.  He  had  not 
been  long  enough  in  politics  to  acquire  the  devoted  follow 
ing  of  a  Roosevelt,  Bryan,  or  McKinley.  His  selection  by 
his  own  party  was  based  on  the  negative  merit  of  avajla- 
bility  rather  than  preference.  Among  the  intellectuals  he 
was  widely  known  and  appreciated,  and  as  governor  of  New 
Jersey  he  had  shown  vigor  for  reform  and  promise  of  leader 
ship.  But  William  Jennings  Bryan,  whom  he  had  a  few 
years  earlier  desired  to  see  " knocked  into  a  cocked  hat," 
was  the  controlling  ruler  of  the  Democratic  Party.  His 
immediate  predecessor,  Taft,  had  suffered  because  the  real 
leader,  Roosevelt,  was  alive  and  active.  President  Harri 
son  had  been  embarrassed  because  James  G.  Blaine  was  a 
greater  man  than  he.  The  chances  were  all  against  Wil 
son's  ability  to  dominate  his  own  party,  and  to  make  that 
party  lead  the  country. 

The  new  Cabinet  was  not  announced  until  after  the  in 
auguration,  but  the  rumor  correctly  stated  the  fact  that 
Bryan  was  to  be  Secretary  of  State.  No  other  Wilson's 
Cabinet  officer  was  widely  known  as  a  political  Cabmet 
administrator,  and  none  was  identified  with  the  wealthy 
and  fashionable  society  that  had  been  visible  in  Washing 
ton  under  Taft  and  Roosevelt.  William  G.  McAdoo,  Sec 
retary  of  the  Treasury,  was  chiefly  known  because  of  the 
river  tunnels  which  he  had  recently  provided  for  New  York 
City,  and  his  vigorous  work  in  the  recent  campaign.  Jo- 
sephus  Daniels,  Secretary  of  the  Navy,  had  relatives  in 
the  naval  service,  but  was  himself  editor  of  the  Raleigh, 


404     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

North  Carolina,  Observer,  and  without  special  technical 
qualifications  for  his  post.  Franklin  K.  Lane  brought  to 
the  Interior  Department  long  experience  gained  in  the 
Interstate  Commerce  Commission.  David  F.  Houston 
came  directly  from  the  presidency  of  a  Western  university 
to  the  Department  of  Agriculture.  William  B.  Wilson,  a 
veteran  labor  leader,  took  charge  of  the  newly  created 
Department  of  Labor.  The  remaining  members  had  their 
reputations  still  before  them,  and  no  member  of  the  Cab 
inet  had  been  long  identified  with  the  management  of 
government. 

The  Democratic  Party,  now  in  power  for  the  first  time 
since  Grover  Cleveland,  had  no  specific  policy  in  1913. 
Demoralized  by  nearly  twenty  years  of  opposition,  it  had 
few  constructive  leaders,  and  was  as  badly  divided  upon 
the  current  issues  as  the  Republican  Party.  It  no  longer 
adhered  to  the  Cleveland  policy  of  a  tariff  for  revenue  only, 
but  was  content  with  a  tariff  revision  that  should  eliminate 
the  most  glaring  abuses  without  destroying  the  principle 
of  protection.  Its  last  great  passion,  free  silver,  had  be 
come  unimportant  with  the  lapse  of  years. 

It  was  necessary  for  President  Wilson  to  outline  policies 
for  his  party  as  well  as  to  improvise  its  leaders.  With  no 
illusions  as  to  the  nature  of  his  election,  he  saw  that  per 
sonal  and  party  success  would  depend  upon  his  ability  to 
carry  with  him  the  progressive  groups  in  both  great  parties. 
He  might  successfully  disregard  the  Bourbon  faction  of  his 
own  party,  which  was  quite  as  reactionary  as  the  most 
11  stand-pat"  Republicans,  and  which  might  be  forced  into 
caucus  and  held  in  line  by  party  pressure;  but  there  could 
be  only  failure  for  the  President  who  could  not  see  thatjthe 
public  that  desired  the  Roosevelt  policies  in,  190$  still  de 
manded  them,  and  with  greater  definiteness.  Between  his 
election  and  inauguration  Wilson  spoke  at  Staunton,  Chi 
cago,  and  Trenton  upon  the  constructive  work  proposed 
for  his  Administration,  and  promised  that  an  effort  should 
be  made  to  settle  adequately  the  three  problems  outstand 
ing  for  a  generation,  of  tariff,  finance,  and  trusts.  There 


WOODROW  WILSON  405 

was  no  intention  in  his  mind  to  wait  for  Congress^  to^act 
upon  its  own  initiative,  as  Taft  had  done.  The  theory  of 
the  presidency  that  Hayes  and  Cleveland  had  glimpsed, 
and  Roosevelt  had  followed,  was  that  of  Wilson.  "The 
President  is  at  liberty,  both  in  law  and  conscience,  to  be  as 
big  a  man  as  he  can.  His  capacity  will  set  the  limit,"  he 
had  written  while  yet  a  professor.  uHe  has  no  means  of 
compelling  Congress  except  through  public  opinion." 

Congress  was  summoned  to  meet  in  special  session  on 
April  7,  1913,  to  take  up  its  action  in  fulfilling  party 
pledges,  as  Woodrow  Wilson  interpreted  them.  Tariff 
In  both  houses  there  was  a  Democratic  majority  revision 
for  the  first  time  since  1893-95.  In  the  House  of  Repre 
sentatives  there  was  physical  reorganization  as  well .  Stead 
ily  since  the  Civil  War  each  census  had  shown  an  enlarged 
population  for  the  country,  and  Congress  had  apportioned 
Representatives  among  the  States  in  accordance  with  it. 
The  number  of  seats  to  be  provided  had  steadily  grown 
until  in  the  Sixty-Third  Congress  now  assembling  there 
were  435  members.  In  the  old  Hall  of  Representatives 
each  member  had  had  his  separate  desk  and  chair,  and 
many  of  them  had  spent  their  time  during  sessions  reading 
the  newspapers  and  signing  their  correspondence.  The 
Senate,  with  its  smaller  membership,  retained  the  sem 
blance  of  a  parliamentary  body,  but  the  House  was  noisy, 
inattentive,  and  more  badly  congested  as  to  space,  as  each 
new  apportionment  bill  increased  the  number  of  desks  and 
chairs  to  be  accommodated.  For  many  years  parliamentary 
reformers  urged  a  physical  reconstruction  of  the  chamber, 
that  it  might  become  an  auditorium  large  enough  to  ac 
commodate  its  members,  small  enough  for  them  to  hear 
debate,  and  free  from  the  distractions  of  members'  private 
business.  The  completion  of  the  new  office  buildings  for 
the  members  of  the  Senate  and  House  removed  the  last  ar 
gument  in  favor  of  the  individual  desks.  The  new  Con 
gress  met  in  a  reconstructed  hall  with  the  desks  gone,  and 
with  concentric  benches  facing  the  Speaker;  with  a  great 
table  facing  him  for  Oscar  W.  Underwood,  chairman  of 


406     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNIT]  !  ES 

the  Committee  on  Ways  and  Mear^  and  leader  of  the  ma 
jority,  and  another  for  James  R*,  Mann,  leader  of  the 
minority. 

The  physical  novelty  in  the  reconstructed  House  was  out 
classed  by  the  political  novelty,  when  the  President  re- 
Presidential  verted  from  the  usage  of  a  century  to  the  prac- 
leadership  tice  of  Washington  and  Adams,  and  appeared 
in  person  to  deliver  his  message.  While  the  House  was 
growing  larger  in  the  last  half-century,  messages  had  been 
growing  longer,  and  their  thousands  of  words  droned  by 
official  readers  to  an  inattentive  Congress  had  lacked  in 
inspiration  and  result.  By  reading  the  message  himself, 
President  Wilson  invited  attention  to  its  content,  and  by 
condensing  it  to  a  few  hundred  words,  he  made  it  impossi 
ble  for  any  one  to  ignore  his  meaning.  "It  is  clear  to  the 
whole  country  that  the  tariff  duties  must  be  altered,"  he 
said.  "They  must  be  changed  to  meet  the  radical  altera 
tion  in  the  conditions  of  our  economic  life  which  the  country 
has  witnessed  within  the  last  generation.  .  .  .  Consciously 
or  unconsciously,  we  have  built  up  a  set  of  privileges  and 
exemptions  from  competition  behind  which  it  was  easy  by 
any,  even  the  crudest,  forms  of  combination  to  organize  a 
monopoly;  until  at  last  nothing  is  normal,  nothing  is  obliged 
to  stand  the  tests  of  efficiency  and  economy  in  our  world 
of  big  business,  but  everything  thrives  by  concerted  ar 
rangement.  .  .  .  We  are  to  deal  with  the  facts  of  our  own 
day,  with  the  facts  of  no  other,  and  to  make  laws  that  square 
with  those  facts."  He  demanded  that  Congress  begin  with 
a  revision  of  the  tariff  and  served  notice  that  at  a  later 
time  he  might  call  their  attention  "to  reforms  that  should 
press  close  upon  the  heels  of  the  tariff  changes,  if  not  ac 
company  them,  of  which  the  chief  is  the  reform  of  our  bank 
ing  and  currency  laws." 

The  Underwood  Bill,  ready  for  jntrpductionju^j^Con- 

Underwood-  grpSS  rnnvpnpd,  was  the  product  of  Special  Stud- 
Simmons  ies  in  the  last  session,  and  of  the  single  schedule 

A  p4- 

bills  of  the  preceding  Congress.     It  passed  the 
House  unamended  in  May  as  a  triumph  of  party  manip- 


WOODROW  WILSON  407 

ulation.  Only  five  Democrats  voted  against  it  on  final 
passage,  although  a  considerably  larger  number  disliked 
serious  revision.  During  the  debate  rumors  were  heard 
that  the  lobby  that  had  usually  accompanied  tariff  debates 
was  again  on  hand,  trying  to  secure  special  favors  in  the 
schedules.  The  President  immediately  made  public  charge 
that  such  a  lobby  was  interfering  with  the  freedom  of  de 
bate,  and  in  the  Senate  a  committee  to  investigate  the  lobby 
began  its  sessions  early  in  June.  By  these  tactics  the  lobby 
was  placed  at  great  disadvantage  and  it  was  made  easier 
for  Congressmen  to  be  faithful  to  the  party  purpose.  The 
Underwood-Simmons  tariff  passed  the  Senate  early  in  Sep 
tember  with  two  Progressive  Republicans,  La  Follette  and 
Poindexter,  supporting  it,  and  was  everywhere  regarded  as 
a  personal  victory  for  the  President  in  holding  his  party 
together.  The  difficulties  in  maintaining  Democratic  unity 
were  greatest  in  the  case  of  the  sugar  schedule,  where  free 
sugar  was  bitterly  opposed  by  Democratic  members  from 
beet-sugar  or  cane-sugar  areas.  The  iron  rule  of  the  party 
caucus  was  exerted  over  these.  The  average  rates  of  tariff 
were  reduced  from  a  level  of  about  thirty-seven  per  cent  to 
that  of  twenty-seven  per  cent,  and  the  free  list  was  enlarged 
to  include  wool,  cotton,  hemp,  and  flax,  and  other  agricul 
tural  products.  The  Sixteenth  Amendment  authorizing  the 
levying  of  an  income  tax,  which  was  submitted  to  the 
States  during  the  Payne-Aldrich  debate,  was  now  in  force. 
An  income  tax  was  accordingly  included  in  the  Underwood- 
Simmons  Bill,  based  upon  a  one  per  cent  rate  on  incomes 
over  four  thousand  dollars  and  rising  on  incomes  above 
twenty  thousand.  The  best  experience  for  determining  its 
probable  yield  came  from  Wisconsin,  where  such  a  tax  had 
been  effective  since  1911.  The  principle  of  an  expert  tariff 
commission,  for  which  Taft  and  Roosevelt  had  contended, 
was  abandoned.  It  was  recalled  three  years  later,  when 
the  World  War  had  changed  the  course  of  trade.  A  Tariff 
Commission  was  created  in  September,  1916,  and  placed 
under  the  direction  of  F.  W.  Taussig  as  chairman. 

The  prestige  of  the  President  was  high  when  he  signed 


4o8     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITE!  >  STATKS 
the  Underwood-Simmons^ll  on  October     ,   11.      His 


leadership  kept  the  principle  of  revision  downward  always 
to  the  front.  The  protectionists  and  Democrats,  who  had 
worked  against  their  party  in  the  Mills  Bill  (1888)  and 
Wilson  Bill  (1894)  debates,  were  coerced  into  party  loyalty. 
The  lobby  was  discredited,  and  investigation  of  it  and  of 
party  campaign  funds  of  recent  years  emboldened  timid 
Congressmen  to  disregard  local  pressure.  The  day  after 
its  passage  Underwood  announced  his  candidacy  for  a 
vacant  seat  in  the  Senate  from  Alabama,  and  in  the  fol 
lowing  spring,  in  an  election  under  the  new  Seventeenth 
Amendment,  carried  his  State  over  Richmond  Pearson 
Hobson,  the  hero  of  the  Merrimac,  and  an  advocate  of  pro 
hibition.  Congress  meanwhile  entered  upon  the  second 
chapter  of  its  task,  the  revision  of  the  financial  laws. 

The  Aldrich  JVIqnetary  Commission,  created  by  Congress 
after  the  panic  of  1907,  prepared  an  elaborate  series  of 
Monetary  studies  in  the  fields  of  banking,  currency,  and 
investiga-  panics,  and  was  forced  to  terminate  its  labors 
in  1912.  Before  its  final  report  was  ready  for 
publication  so  much  odium  was  attached  to  the  name  of  its 
chairman  as  to  destroy  the  immediate  utility  of  any  recom 
mendation  he  should  make.  Aldrich  had  been  the  great 
tariff  specialist  in  the  Senate  since  his  entry  into  that  body 
in  time  to  participate  in  making  the  tariff  of  1883.  He  was 
a  consistent  advocate  of  high  protection,  and  enjoyed  the 
steady  support  of  the  great  manufacturing  interests  that 
came  under  attack  between  1900  and  1908.  His  participa 
tion  in  the  framing  of  the  tariff  bill  that  bore  his  name  made 
him  a  target  for  Progressive  attacks,  which  were  made 
worse  by  his  identification  with  the  "  stand-pat"  group 
that  insisted  upon  nominating  Taft  in  1912.  His  studies 
of  the  banking  situation,  more  painstaking  than  those  of 
any  other  Congressman,  led^  him  to  the  advocacy  of  a 
central  bank;  but  the  idea  of  a  cen  t  raj  Mbankji  ad  been 
unpopular  since  Andrew  Jackson  destroyed  the  Second 
Bank  of  the  United  States,  and  Aldrich's  own  connection 
with  big  business  was  such  as  to  make  a  large  portion 


WOODROW  WILSON  409 

of  the  public  suspicious  of  any  scheme  that  hejnight  rec- 
ommen6rT~~ 

The  financial  situation  was  bad  and  was  steadily  growing 
worse.  The  control  of  crecfitwas  subject  to  misuse  or 
abuse,  the  currency  itself  failed  to  inspire  confidence  in  its 
solidity,  and  there  was  a  strong  suspicion  that  the  trust 
movement  had  extended  its  clutches  into  the  field  of  finance 
as  well  as  into  that  of  industry  and  transportation.  So 
far  as  the  currency  was  concerned,  the  slight  margin  by 
which  free_^ih^r^_was  avoio!ed  in  i8q6-irightened  sober 
thinkers  into  making  serious  studies  of  the  money  problem. 
The  ordinary  money  of  exchange  —  gold,  silver,  subsidi 
ary  coinage,  gold  certificates,  silver  certificates,  Civil  War 
greenbacks,  Sherman  Act  legal  tenders,  and  national  bank 
notes  —  circulated  at  par  only  because  of  the  public  promise 
to  redeem  it  in  gold  coin.  The  legal  reserve  of  $150,000,000 
was  inadequate  to  meet  any  real  crisis.  In  the_panic  of 
1907  fear_that  the  Treasury  mighl_iiQt  maintain  the  gold 
basis  was  everywhere  felt  and  led  to  hoarding  of  all  varieties 
oT  currency.  In  violation  of  the  law,  the  clearing-houses 
were  compelled  to  issue  notes  of  their  own,  based  upon  col 
lateral,  in  order  to  avoid  the  worse  evil  of  financial  collapse. 
The  national  bank  notes,  instead  of  rjroviding_a  flexible 
element  in  the  currency  were  so  circumscribed  by  law  as  to 
have  an  opposite  tendency.  There  was  no  elasticity  in  the 
system  to  provide  for  seasonal  expansion  to  move  the  crops 
in  the  fall,  or  emergency,  issues  to  forestall  panics.  The 
Aldrich-Vreeland  Bill  of  1908  made  moderate  provision  for 
this  need,  but  TefTthe  question  of  credit  control  untouched. 

Having  no  public  control,  the  banks  and  trust  companies 
had  neither  guidance  nor  restriction  in  the  use  of  credit. 
They  operated  on  a  strictly  competitive  basis,  and  when  in 
periods  of  great  speculation  it  became  profitable  to  deposit 
their  funds  in  New  York  banks  where  stock  gamblers  could 
use  them,  thither  the  money  went  regardless  of  the  more 
prosaic  daily  requirements  of  business  for  commercial 
credit.  The  merchant,  who  needed  to  discount  his  notes 
as  regularly  as  he  bought  his  toal  or  paid  his  rent,  found  that 

A 


410     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

the  speculator  received  preferential  treatment  at  the  banks. 
The  Aldrich  Commission,  with  the  assistance  of  banking  ex 
perts  and  economists,  worked  upon  methods  whereby  the 
speculative  use  of  credit  might  be  curtailed  in  order  to  make 
more  certain  provision  for  commerce.  There  was  lack  of 
flexibility  in  the  control  of  credit  as  of  currency.  Huge 
balances  were  apt  to  accumulate  and  lie  idle,  while  Western 
farmers  were  clamoring  for  credit.  There  was  need  for 
greater  fluidity  in  order  to  permit  the  funds  to  flow  freely 
where  they  were  most  needed. 

The  existence  of  a  money  trust^  was  made  much  of  by 
Progressive  leaders,  who  charged  that  the  control  of  credit 
was  monopolized  as  completely  as  industry  and  railroads. 
They  declared  that  a  few  great  banks,  controlling  billions 
of  deposits  and  con trolleoMjy_ small  groups  ^oLiiirectors, 
made  it  impossible  for  outsiders  to  procure  the  credit  to 
build  new  railroads  or  construct  new  industries,  while 
lending  it  recklessly  to  insiders  for  the  further  advancement 
of  existing  monopolies.  The  Progressives  charged  as  well, 
and  Democrats  echoed  the  charge,  that  the  directors  of  the 
great  banks  lent  the  money  to  themselves  in  defiance  of 
sound  morality  if  not  of  law.  It  was  freely  asserted,  and 
great  diagrams  were  drawn  up  to  prove  it,  that_a_system^pf 
interlocking  directorates  was  bringing  the  whole  American 
economic  life jnto  one  gigantic  consolidation^at  the  heart 
of  which  lay  the  mone_y_trust. 

Theexchange  of  directors  was  a  common  feature  in  the 
financing  of  the  trusts.  The  steel  interests  were  repre 
sented  on  the  railroad  boards,  the  railroads  in  turn  were 
represented  on  the  banking  directorates,  the  banks  placed 
members  on  the  governing  bodies  of  the  industries  that  did 
business  with  them.  It  was  possible  to  show  by  diagram 
how  a  handful  of  banks  in  Wall  Street  were  interlocked 
with  all  the  great  railroads  and  industries  of  the  country. 
The  House  Committee  on  Banking  and  Currency,  under  the 
chairmanship  of  A.  P.  Pujo,  of  Louisiana,  made  a  detailed 
investigation  of  the  money  trust  in  1912,  and  by  its  report 
added  to  the  resentment  felt  toward  big  business  and  to 

* 


WOODROW  WILSON  411 

the  odium  that  was  attached  to  the  idea  of  a  central  bank. 
The  great  financiers  themselves  either  denied  the  existence 
of  a  money  trust  or  smilingly  admitted  it  and  inquired, 
'  '  Can  you  unscramble  eggs  ?  "  The  problem  of  business  and 
financial  legislation  was  to  find  a  means  of  unscrambling 
the  eggs  without  addling  them. 

The  House  Committee  on  Banking  and^  Currency,  under 
the  chairmanship  of  Carter  GlassToTVirginia,  began  work 


upon  financial  legislation  early^in^jxyj^  and  in-  Federal 
troduced  a  banking  bill  in  the  later  stages  of  the  Reserve  Act 
tariff  legislation.  The  proposal  was  to  avoid  the  politically 
dangerous  central  bank  and  yet  secure  for  the  country  all 
the  advantages  of  such  an  institution.  It  was  accordingly 
proposedjto  establish  a  federal  reserve  system  in  which  the 
country  should  be  divided  into  districts  (twelve  being  later 
created),  in  each  of  which  the  local  banks  should  become 
members  of  an  association  for  the  erection  of  a  federal  re 
serve  bank.  The  federal  reserve  banks  were  to  receive  on 
deposit  the  reserves  of  member  banks,  and  it  was  to  be 
made  less  easy  for  these  reserves  to  accumulate  in  Wall 
Street.  Provision  was  also  made  for  the  issuance  of  notes 
by  the  federal  reserve  banks  based  upon  commercial  secu 
rities  and  other  assets  deposited  with  them  by  member 
banks.  The  federal  reserve  banks  themselves  were  to  be 
under  the  general  oversight  of  a  Federal  Reserve  Board 
composed  partly  of  public  officers  and  partly  of  financial 
appointees  serving  for  a  term  of  twelve  years,  the  board 
being  closely  attached  to  the  Treasury  of  the  United 
States.  The  newfinanciaj_jaw  was_endorsed  by  the  Pres 
ident  in  an  aHHrpgS  fo  Congress  on  June  23.  IQH.  and 
that  body  plunged  into  the  middle  of  the  federal  reserve 
debate  after  the  passage  of  the  Underwood-Simmons  tariff. 
Fatigued  by  their  months  of  labor  on  the  tariff,  they  had 
hoped  for  a  recess  in  the  autumn,  but  President  Wilson 
insisted  that  Congress  stay  on  the  job  till  it  was  done.  In 
December  they  looked  for  a  recess  at  Christmas  with  the 
passage  of  the  act  postponed  until  1914.  Again  executive 
pressure  was  exerted  to  procure  legislation  nt  ^nre,  with 


412     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

the  result  that  the  Federal  Reserve  Bill  became^law  De 
cember  23,  1913.  "  It  assumed  the  character  of  a  political 
miracle/'  wrote  one  of  the  leading  economists  who  had 
despaired  of  constructive  legislation  on  finance.  Not 
more  than  three  financial  events  in  the  history  of  the 
United  States  ranked  with  it  in  significance.  The  assump 
tion  of  the  public  debt  by  Hamilton,  the  destruction  of 
the  Second  Bank  by  Jackson,  and  the  inauguration  of  the 
national  banking  system  by  Chase,  alone  are  to  be  com 
pared  with  it.  The  banks  that  protested  bitterly  through 
out  the  debate  against  any  governmental  interference 
found  that  they  liked  it  in  its  final  passage.  In  the  follow 
ing  year,  under  the  direction  of  Secretary  McAdoo,  the 
new  law  was  brought  into  operation,  the  country  was  di 
vided  into  reserve  districts,  the  Federal  Board  and  the 
reserve  banks  began  to  operate.  From  the  standpoint  ol 
currency  and  credit  the  resources  of  the  country  were 
better  distributed  than  before,  and  it  was  no  mean  advan 
tage  of  the  system  that  the  Treasury  of  the  United  States 

Wall  S  t  re^LLJQX.assistaji  ce  ,  but 
toit.     The  act  would  have  been  im 


possible  without  the  prolonged  financial  investigations  of 
the  Roosevelt  and  Taft  Administrations,  but  its  passage  by 
a  Democratic  Congress  in  the  first  session  of  a  new  Admin- 
is  traJtiori_^£riDed-fee  increase  the  prestige  that  was  ~atf  aching 

itself  to  the  political  leadership  ot  Woodrow  WilsonT 

»-  __  ^  _  _  __  _ 

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL  NOTE 

William  Bayard  Hale,  Woodrow  Wilson:  The  Story  of  his  Life  (1912), 
is  a  campaign  biography  of  the  usual  type.  The  monetary  discussion  has 
for  its  background  the  admirable  studies  made  for  the  Aldrich  Monetary 
Commission.  These  are  reviewed  in  Wesley  C.  Mitchell,  "The  Publica 
tions  of  the  National  Monetary  Commission,"  in  the  Quarterly  Journal  of 
Economics,  vol.  xxv,  p.  563.  The  working  of  the  new  law  is  summed  up  in 
E.  W.  Kemmerer,  The  A.  B.C.  of  the  Federal  Reserve  System  (3d  ed.,  1919). 
The  report  of  the  Pujo  Committee  contains  much  valuable  subsidiary 
material,  under  the  title  U.S.  Money  Trust  Investigation  Reports  (1912-13). 
Numerous  technical  articles  on  the  Tariff  and  Federal  Reserve  Acts  are  to 
be  found  in  the  standard  journals,  such  as  the  Journal  of  Political  Economy 
and  the  Quarterly  Journal  of  Economics. 


CHAPTER  XLII 

FEDERAL  CONTROL 

THE  Sixty-Third  Congress,  beginning  its  session  on  April  7, 
1913,  sat  until  October  24,  1914,  making  a  new  record  for 
Congressional  diligence.  The  Democratic  party  leaders, 
conscious  of  their  uncertain  tenure  upon  political  power, 
determined  to  keep  busy  so  long  as  the  going  was  good,  while 
their  party  followers  submerged  their  personal  preferences 
as  they  acted  upon  the  maxim  of  Benjamin  Franklin  that 
they  must  hang  together  or  hang  separately.  Instead  of 
resting,  content  with  the  passage  of  two  basic  laws,  they 
were  called  to  renewed  efforts  when  the  President  ad 
dressed  them  on  the  subject  of  the  trusts  on  January  20, 
1914. 

The  new  Administration,  acting  through  Attorney- 
General  James  C.  McReynolds,  was  no  longer  spending  its 
strength  upon  suits  for  the  dissolution  of  cor-  Anti-trust 
porations.  It  was  instead  working  for  an  am-  P°llcies 
icable  dissolution  of  mergers  by  inducing  big  business  to 
readjust  its  affairs  voluntarily  in  order  to  come  into  better 
harmony  with  the  Sherman  Law.  In  his  address  to  Congress 
Wilson  took  a  course  close  to  that  outlined  by  Senator 
La  Follette  and  Louis  Brandeis  who  had  gained  distinction 
in  the  legal  controversy  with  the  trusts.  A  series  of  Ad 
ministration  bills  made  clear  his  intent,  and  included  a 
better  definition  of  unlawful  monopoly  and  restraint  of 
trade  than  the  Sherman  Act  had  given;  denned  a  new  list 
of  unfair_trade  practices  and  forbade  them;  provided  for 
the  regulation  oT~corpora"tion  directorates  and  prohibited 
their  interlocking;  and  finally  created  a  commission  to 
stand  toward  .interstate  trade  in  the  relationship  already 
held  by  the  Interstate  Commerce  Commission  toward  trans 
portation. 

The  general  drift  of  trust  legislation  as  proposed  gives 


414     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

evidence  to  the  determination  of  the  President  to  hold  his 
party  together  by  strict^party  discipline  and  to  secure  the 
enactment,  not  of  party  measures,  but  of  the  non-partisan 
rjirpgram  of  the^  progressive  citizens  whom  he  believed  to 
constitute  the  bulk  of  both  great  parties.  The  debate  over 
the  trusts  was  thirty  years  old.  It  had  produced  only  one 
basic  restraining  law,  whose  intent  was  to  abolish  the 
combinations  rather  than  control  them.  The  renewal  of 
the  debate  behind  the  leadership  of  Roosevelt  had  devel 
oped  doubts  as  to  whether  abolition  was  either  wise  or 
possible,  and  had  brought  out  a  distinction  between  good 
trusts  and  bad.  In  their  platforms  of  1912  the  Demo 
cratic  and  Progressive  parties  had  taken  different  views 
of  the  problem;  the  former,  adhering  to  the  doctrine  of 
the  Sherman  Act,  demanded  that  the  law  be  made  more 
stringent  to  restore  free  competition  and  break  up  the 
trusts.  The  Progressives,  however,  recommended  a  dis 
crimination  between  the  useful  and  injurious  forms  of 
combination,  a  definition  of  unfair  practices,  and  the  cre 
ation  of  federal  machinery  to  watch  the  trusts.  It  was  this 
Progressive  program  that  Wilson  supported  more  nearly 
than  that  of  his  own  party. 

TheJinancial  legislation  of  1913  touch ecLa_larg£  portian 
pf^ the^  tnost^jDroblem  In  the  Federal  Reserve  Act  the 
Finance  banks  and  the  people  were  reconciled,  leaving 
and  trusts  ^e  res£  of  ^g  prODlem  much  easier  of  solution. 
In  1914,  while  Congress  was  debating  its  next  steps,  the 
banks  were  cheerfully  preparing  to  enter  into  the  new 
relationship  of  the  federal  reserve  system.  Decentralized 
reserves,  flexibility  of  currency,  and  public  control  were 
established  over  the  financial  world. 

After  eight  months  of  debate  the  trust  legislation  was 
enacted  without  encountering  partisan  opposition.  On 
Federal  September  26,  1914,  the  Federal  Trade  Com- 

Trade  mission  was  created  to  represent  the  Govern- 
Commission  •— : T  — .  .  ,  f  ,, f— 

mentjn  its  oversight  of  the  trusts.  It  was  to 
consist  of  a  non-partisan  board  of  five  members,  the  sub 
ject-matter  of  whose  control  was  defined  in  the  Clayton 


FEDERAL  CONTROL  415 

Anti-Trust  Law  of  QctoberjL^J^X4.  The  chief  purpose  of 
thislict  was  to  forbldhiterlocking  directorates  in  business  as 
they  had  already  been  forbidden  in  banking;  to  forbid  cor 
porations  having  trustees  in  common  from  doing  business 
with  each  other;  to  prohibitjmfair_traduig,  and  to  grant 
special  privileges  to  organized  labor  and  to  farmers.  A 
great  obstacleln  thecourse  of  anti-trust  legislation  was  the 
attitude  of  organized  labor  which  desired  to  see  commercial 
combinations  restricted,  but  which  asserted  the  right  of 
labor  to  combine  freely  for  any  purpose.  Farmers  gen 
erally  looked  upon  their  own  associations,  organized  for 
marketing  purposes,  as  benevolent  combinations  rather 
than  injurious.  The  insistence  of  these  two  groups  im 
periled  the  passage  of  the  Clayton  Act,  until  the  act  was 
amended  to  provide  that  the  restrictions  placed  upon  the 
trusts  should  not  be  interpreted  as  applying  to  labor  or  to 
agriculture. 

Labor  was  closer  to  the  Democratic  Administration  than 
it  had  been  to  any  other.  Ever  since  the  failure  of  Gompers 
to  induce  the  Republican  Convention  of  1908  Department 
to  adopt  the  anti-injunction  plank  that  he  de-  of  Labor 
sired,  he  had  tended  to  work  in  harmony  with  the  Demo 
cratic  leaders.  The  unnatural  union  contained  in  the 
Department  of  Commerce  and  Labor  was  the  subject  of 
criticism  which  resulted  in  its  division  in  1913.  Taft^ 
signed  the  bill  creating  a  Department  of  Labor  with  re 
luctance  because  of  his  dislike  to  enlarge  the  Cabinet. 
WilliarnB.  Wilson^  the  first  Secretary  of  Labor,  built  up 
the  organization  of  the  new  department,  having  jurisdiction 
over  not  only  the  old  Bureau  of  Labor,  but  the  related  fields 
of  immigration,  naturalization,  and  the  Children's  Bureau. 

The  Children's  Bureau^with  Julia  C.  Lathrop  as  chief, 
was  created  in  1912  to  promote  the  "  welfare  of  children 
and  child  life."     It  was  fifty  years  after  the  time    children's 
when  Congress  legislated  for  the  gathering  of    Bureau 
"all  information  concerning  agriculture"  before  that  body 
could  be  induced  to  take  the  first  steps  for  the  conservation 
of  the  raw  material  of  citizenship.     The  experience  of  the 


4i6    RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

social  workers  in  the  congested  districts  of  great  cities  was 
every  year  making  it  more  apparent  that  poverty  and  dis 
ease  were  depriving  each  generation  of  a  part  of  its  chance 
for  life.  Jane  Addams  at  Hull  House  in  Chicago  and 
Lillian  D.  Wald,  of  the  Henry  Street  Settlement  in  New 
York,  were  leaders  in  the  demand  that  a  government  that 
safeguarded  the  live-stock  and  the  crops  ought  to  value 
the  welfare  of  its  children  Colonel  Roosevelt  in  1912 
drew  much  support  from  leaders  like  these,  who  saw  in 
the  Progressive  movement  a  chance  of  meeting  social 
needs.  Transferred  to  the  Department  of  Labor  as  one 
of  its  constituent  bureaus,  the  Children's  Bureau  rapidly 
expanded  the  scope  of  its  investigations  and  administrative 
duties  for  the  benefits  of  its  wards.  In  September,  1916, 
Congress  passed  an  act  "to  prevent  interstate  commerce 
in  the  products  of  child  labor."  Such  a  law  had  been  de 
manded  by  progressives  for  ten  years  on  humanitarian 
grounds,  and  received  special  new  support  now  from  man 
ufacturing  interests  in  the  North  and  West.  Most  of  the 
Northern  States  had  already  passed  laws  prohibiting  the 
labor  of  children  under  fourteen  years  of  age,  but  in  South 
ern  States  where  no  such  law  prevailed,  cotton  mills  using 
child  labor  were  offering  a  competition  embarrassing  to 
Northern  factories  using  adult  labor.  The  Keating-Owen 
Child  Labor  Bill,  as  this  was  called,  remained  in  force 
for  less  than  a  year  because  the  Supreme  Court  in  1918 
declared  it  to  be  unconstitutional.  The  Children's  Bureau 
by  this  date  had  become  an  active  growing  concern  with 
many  other  matters  receiving  its  attention. 

Another  of  the  bureaus  of  the  Department  of  Labor  had 
administrative  charge  of  workmen^  compensation  so  far 
Workmen's  as  tne  United  States  was  concerned.  With  the 
compensa-  progress  of  industrial  organization,  the  problem 
of  the  industrially  maimed  increased  in  its  im 
portance.  Employers'  liability  for  injuries  received  by 
workmen  was  limited  by  the  legal  doctrines  of  contributory 
negligence  and  fellow-servant,  while  the  amount  received 
by  injured  workmen  had  to  bear  the  expensive  cost  of 


FEDERAL  CONTROL  417 

litigation  to  secure  the  awards.  The  result  was  that  society 
in  general  carried  the  charge  of  the  industrial  cripples  and 
their  dependent  families  instead  of  the  industries  concerned. 
In  1908  Congress  passed  an  employers'  liability  law  af 
fecting  common  carriers  engaged  in  interstate  commerce, 
replacing  an  earlier  law  that  the  Supreme  Court  had  de 
clared  unconstitutional.  A  series  of  similar  laws  passed  by 
the  States  accepted  the  principle  of  workmen's  compen 
sation  according  to  a  definite  scale  without  litigation  or 
cost  to  the  injured  persons.  Industry  proceeded  to  insure 
its  employees  against  the  risk  of  accident  and  to  inaugurate 
a  campaign  for  "safety  first"  that  progressively  reduced 
both  the  risk  and  the  accidents.  So  far  as  federal  em 
ployees  were  concerned,  Congress  passed  a  workmen's 
compensation  act  in  1908  to  be  administered  by  the  old 
Department  of  Labor,  which  became  the  Bureau  of  Labor 
Statistics  in  the  new_department  of  1913.  In  the  fields  of 
child  welfare  and  industrial  accident  Congress  was  engaged 
in  stretching  the  limits  of  its  power  to  regulate  interstate 
commerce. 

It  was  no  new  thing  for  Congress  to  be  interested  in  the 
education  of  citizens.  Since  1862  thejland-grantj^olleges^ 
established  under  the  Morrill  Act,  had  been  Educational 
concerned  with  agricultural  and  industrial  edu-  §rants 
cation.  In  some  of  the  Western  universities  successful 
attempts  were  made  after  1900  to  extend  the  benefits  of 
education  to  the  adult  population,  and  extension  divisions 
were  established  to  carry  education  to  the  people.  In  1914 
the  Smith-Lever  Act  provided  for  cooperation  in  agricul- 
t u ral  extension  between  theJDepartment  of  Agriculture  and 
the~Iand-grant  colleges,  and  the  United  States  assumed  a 
part  6T  the  responsibility  for  this  type  of  local  instruction. 
In  February,  1917,  this  policy  was  further  extended  by  an 
act  that  created  the  Federal  Board  of  Vocational  Rdnra- 
tion,  whose  function  was  to  cooperate  with  the  States, 
dollar  for  dollar,  in  instruction  in  agriculture,  commerce, 
industry,  and  domestic  science.  In  each  of  these  cases  a 
program  of  progressive  increase  was  planned  and  accepted 


4i 8     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

locally.  A  network  of  new  federal  instructional  officers, 
touching  individual  citizens  in  the-  most  remote  districts, 
was  the  outcome. 

Still  another  division  of  the  Department  of  Labor  began 
immediately  to  put  together  a  United  States  employment 
service.  The  powers  for  this  were  derived  by  implication, 
partly  from  the  organic  act  of  the  Department,  which 
specified  services  to  the  wage-earner,  and  partly  from  the 
immigration  law  of  1907,  which  gave  the  Bureau  of  Immi 
gration  power  to  assist  in  placing  immigrants  where  they 
could  be  used.  An  emergency  call  for  harvest  hands  from 
Oklahoma  in  1914  gave  the  impetus  from  which  an  employ 
ment  service  was  developed  in  the  next  two  years. 

Another  highly  controversial  measure  concerning  the 
status  of  labor  was  pending  in-  Congress  when  the  anti- 
Seamen's  trust  legislation  of  1914  was  passed.  This  was 
Act  Andrew  Furugeth's  Seamen's  Bill  for  the_im- 

p£ovementjifjdi£_conditionTof  sailors  in  the  merchant  serv 
ice.  The  bill  represented  the  aspirations  of  the  seamen's 
unions  and  was  designed  to  revolutionize  the  relations  of 
the  sailor  to  his  employer.  The  prevailing  practice  made 
a  seaman  for  the  term  of  his  contract  bound  to  his  master. 
The  powers  of  a  captain  of  a  ship  at  sea,  always  large,  were 
buttressed  by  the  fact  that  his  hands  could  not  desert  their 
jobs  when  his  ship  touched  port.  Supported  persistently 
by  Senator  La  Follette,  the  Furuseth  Bill  was  in  Congress 
for  two  years.  It  established  physical  conditions  for  the 
housing  of  the  crew  and  their  maintenance,  effective  for  all 
merchant  ships  entering  American  ports.  It  provided  that 
a  seaman  at  any  American  port  might  legally  demand  half 
the  wages  due  him,  and  destroyed  the  power  to  bring  him 
back  if  he  should  desert.  The  power  asserted  in  the  law, 
which  passed  in  1915,  ran  counter  to  provisions  in  the  com 
mercial  treaties  with  most  of  the  maritime  powers,  by 
which  their  seamen  in  America  were  kept  under  their  own 
jurisdiction  as  administered  by  their  consuls.  The  statute 
required  the  State  Department  to  abrogate  these  treaties 
to  this  extent,  and  the  Supreme  Court  in  1920  upheld  the 


FEDERAL  CONTROL  419 

constitutionality  of  the  wage  requirement.  Favored  by 
labor,  the  bill  was  bitterly  opposed  by  the  maritime  inter 
ests,  which  maintained  that  it  was  the  last  blow  against  an 
American  merchant  marine,  already  moribund. 

The  broailejiini:_pro^miii_o£iejeml  activity_gave  point 
to  the  title  of  the  New  Republic  that  appeared  in  Novem 
ber,  1914,  as  an  organ  of  progressives.  The  Critical 
intellectual  leadership  of  the  daily  newspapers  J°urnallsm 
was  weakening  as  the  great  editors  one  by  one  passed  off 
the  stage.  Only  Henry  Watterson  survived  of  that  great 
group  that  had  made  their  journals  real  organs  for  shap 
ing  public  opinion  in  the  two  decades  after  the  Civil  War. 
The  opinions  of  newspapers  seemed  to  be  counting  for 
less  and  less  as  the  years  went  round,  and  the  appearance 
of  new  weeklies  representing  different  shades_joL_Qpinion 
and  uninfluenced  by  advertising  policies,  was  a  conse 
quence.  ^Bryan's  Commoner  (1900)  was  early  in  the  field, 
and  was  followed  in  January,  1909,  by  La  Follettes  Mag 
azine.  Colonel  Roosevelt  became  a  contributing  editor 
to  the  Outlook,  and  later,  the  Metropolitan  Magazine  and 
the  Kansas  City  Star,  after  his  retirement  from  office. 
Max  Eastman  brought  out  the  Masses  as  a  carrier  for 
Socialist  opinions  in  1911,  and  reincarnated  it  in  1918  as 
the  Liberator.  The  weekly  of  radical  labor,  Solidarity,  be 
gan  its  course  in  January,  1910.  The  old  leadership  of  the 
New  York  Nation  in  the  formulation  of  critical  opinion 
weakened  after  the  withdrawal  of  E.  L.  Godkin,  who  re 
tired  in  1899.  The  New  Republic  in  1914  now  added  a 
deliberate  breadth  of  vision  and  was  serving  seventeen 
thousand  subscribers  in  its  second  year.  Both  it  and  the 
Nation  developed  so  rapidly  in  their  liberalism  as  to  leave 
more  conservative  critics  behind,  who  brought  out  in  1919 
the  Review  as  a  protest  against  " unthinking  radicalism"; 
while  in  1920  the  weekly  Freeman  appeared  to  struggle  for 
the  leadership  of  radical  thought. 

The  promise  of  the  Democratic  platform  of  igi2jto  re 
store  freedorn  to  the  Filipino^  at  as  early  a  date  as  possible 
started  a  discussion  in  which  1921  was  accepted  as  the  ulti- 


420     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

mate  date.  Ever  since  Bryan  had  exerted  his  influence  to 
Philippine  accomplish  the  ratification  of  the  Spanish  Treaty 
government  in  l898>  this  poiicy  had  been  a  Democratic  doc 
trine.  In  the  intervening  years  steady  progress  in  the 
directions  of  education,  self-government,  and  peace  had 
been  the  consequence  of  American  administration.  The 
Filipino  Assembly  in  1907  took  over  the  lawmaking  power 
that  the  Philippine  Commission  appointed  by  the  President 
had  hitherto  exercised.  A  new  organic  act  for  the  islands 
became  a  law  in  August,  1916,  after  a  vigorous  debate,  in 
the  early  stages  of  which  Secretary  of  War  Garrison  declared 
his  unwillingness  to  remain  in  the  Cabinet  if  the  principle 
of  immediate  independence  should  be  adopted.  The  new 
act  provided  for  replacing  the  Philippine  Commission  with 
an  elective  Senate  as  the  superior  body  in  the  Philippine 
Congress.  Nearly  three  years  before  its  passage  the  control 
of  the  Commission  had  been  given  over  to  Filipino  citizens. 
Francis  Burton  Harrison,  sent  out  as  Governor-General  in 
1913,  had^announced  the  Administration  poHcy^FadmThis- 
tering  the  Philippine  Islands  as  a  trustee  for  the  Filipinos 
with  a  view  to  their  ultimate  independence,  and  had  prom 
ised  to  take  the  steps,  one  at  a  time  as  conditions  war 
ranted  them,  and  to  begin  by  placing  power  in  the  hands 
of  Filipino  appointees.  A  few  weeks  after  the  arrival  of 
Governor  Harrison  at  his  post  occurred  an  episode  that 
illustrated  the  interest  of  the  President  in  his  success,  as 
well  as  the  fact  that  there  was  a  new  regime  in  Washington. 
The  military  Order  of  the  Carabao  was  founded  at  Manila 
by  the  officers  engaged  in  suppressing  the  insurrection  of 
Aguinaldo,  and  established  "corrals"  at  the  various  army 
centers,  where  from  time  to  time  periodical  "wallows"  gave 
an  opportunity  for  members  of  the  Philippine  expeditionary 
force  to  renew  their  friendships  and  exchange  reminiscences. 
The  society  drew  its  name  from  the  draft  animal  of  the 
Filipinos,  which  was  "said  to  be  slower  than  a  camel  and 
more  obstinate  than  a  mule,"  and  whose  chief  ambition  to 
lie  down  in  a  puddle  provided  the  name  for  the  local  meet 
ings  of  the  society.  In  like  fashion  the  military  Order  of  the 


FEDERAL  CONTROL  421 

Dragon  was  formed  by  the  officers  who  served  in  China, 
as  the  Aztec  Club  had  long  since  been  organized  by  the  con 
querors  of  Mexico.  No  importance  had  ever  been  given  to 
the  songs  and  burlesques  that  accompanied  their  annual 
"wallows"  in  Washington  which  resembled  in  character 
the  meetings  of  the  Gridiron  Club  or  the  Clover  Club. 

In  December,  1913,  the  dinner  of  the  Washington  corral 
of  the  Carabao  was  followed  by  a  burlesque  di-    Attack  on 
rected  against  the  naval  policies  of  Secretary    Bryan  and 

T-X  •     «       •  r  o  T-»  •        Daniels 

Daniels  and  the  interest  of  Secretary  Bryan  in 

peace  and  prohibition,  and  terminated  with  the  famous 

"insurrecto  song"  whose  refrain  ran, 

"  Underneath  the  starry  flag 
Civilize  them  with  a  krag." 

By  order  of  the  President  the  officers  concerned  with  the 
performance  were  immediately  and  publicly  rebuked.  A 
naval  commander  already  detailed  to  the  Asiatic  fleet  was 
transferred,  and  notification  was  abruptly  served  on  the 
military  officers  of  the  United  States  that  it  was  a  gross 
impropriety  for  them  to  discredit  or  interfere  with  the  poli 
cies  of  their  Government. 

The  burlesques  of  Bryan  and  Daniels  were  founded  upon 
disapproval.  Secretary  Bryan  was  already  engaged  in 
negotiation  of  an  elaborate  series  of  peace  treaties  whose 
ideals  had  been  accepted  by  the  Administration.  He  was 
also  one  of  the  leading  advocates  of  prohibition,  and  had 
announced  his  devotion  to  the  fight  to  make  the  United 
States  dry  by  constitutional  amendment.  There  was  wide 
criticism  and  some  serious  disapproval  of  his  determination 
not  to  serve  wine  at  his  residence,  and  the  supposed  hard 
ship  entailed  upon  the  diplomatic  corps  when  they  found 
that  he  had  substituted  grape-juice  became  the  subject  of 
humorous  squibs  without  number.  The  humorous  weekly, 
Life,  totfkup  the  joke  as  though  it  were  serious,  and  devoted 
itself  to  a  campaign  of  farce  against  both  Bryan  and  Daniels. 

Secretary  Daniels  came  into  the  Navy  Department  as  a 
landsman,  as  most  of  his  predecessors  had  done.  Shortly 


422     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

after  his  inauguration  he  approved  a  recommendation  of  the 
general  board  over  which  Admiral  Dewey  presided,  chang 
ing  the  nautical  vocabulary  from  "port"  and  " starboard" 
to  "left"  and  "right."  There  was  resentment  already  de 
veloping  because  of  his  avowed  determination  to  improve 
the  condition  of  the  enlisted  man  and  to  introduce  reforms 
for  his  education  and  betterment.  The  port  and  starboard 
order  was  too  good  an  opportunity  to  be  overlooked. 
Broad  comedy  was  based  upon  it,  and  revived  the  interest 
of  cartoonists  and  joke-makers  in  Gilbert  and  Sullivan's 
Pinafore,  whose  admiral  owed  his  rise  to  a  determination  to 
"Stick  close  to  your  desk  and  never  go  to  sea."  The  at 
tack  on  Daniels  was  intensified  in  1914  when  an  order  was 
issued  requiring  naval  officers  to  give  up  their  wine  mess, 
and  to  conform  to  the  temperance  regulations  imposed  upon 
their  men.  His  recommendation  that  the  Government  un 
dertake  the  manufacture  of  armor  plate  and  heavy  guns  in 
order  to  prevent  being  gouged  by  ordnance  makers,  brought 
him  unpopularity  from  another  quarter.  This  culminated 
at  the  Carabao  dinner,  the  aftermath  of  which  revealed  the 
President  fully  in  support  of  the  members  of  his  official 
family. 

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL  NOTE 

Louis  H.  Haney,  Business  Organization  and  Combination  (1913),  is  a 
general  treatise  on  the  trusts.  More  special  treatments  are  William  Howard 
Taft,  The  Anti-Trust  Act  and  the  Supreme  Court  (1914) ;  E.  D.  Durand,  The 
Trust  Problem  (1915);  and  E.  T.  B.  Pierce,  The  Story  of  the  Trust  Com 
panies  (1916).  The  Annual  Reports  of  the  Federal  Trade  Commission 
and  the  Department  of  Labor  should  be  studied.  An  insular  view  of  the 
Philippines  is  given  in  M.  M.  Kalaw,  The  Case  for  the  Filipinos  (1916);  and 
Self -Government  in  the  Philippines  (1919). 


CHAPTER  XLIII 
WATCHFUL  WAITING 

THE  success  of  President  Wilson's  policy  of  settling  im 
mediately  the  tariff,  financial,  and  ^banking— problems 
brought  a  solution  by  the  autumn  of  1914  to  the  Bryan  in 
question  as  to  whether  or  not  he  could  be  the  State 
leader  of  his  party.  William  Jennings  Bryan, 
whose  dominance  was  unquestioned  at  the  date  of  the  Balti 
more  Convention,  was  believed  to  have  it  in  his  power  to 
wreck  the  Administration  of  any  other  man.  His  appoint 
ment  as  Secretary  of  State  made  it  possible  for  the  Admin 
istration  to  use  his  influence  over  Western  and  Southern 
Democrats,  while  he  in  the  new  office  showed  a  willingness 
to  subordinate  himself  and  cooperate  with  his  chief  that 
contributed  to  the  successful  leadership  of  the  latter.  The 
influence  of  Bryan  was  always  potent  at  the  Capitol,  main 
taining  party  Discipline,  soothing  the  discontented,  and 
facilitating  the  passage  of  the  statutes  of  1913  and  1914. 
By  the  latter  date  the  President  was  in  actual  enjoyment  of 
the  party  leadership  that  Bryan  had  possessed,  and  there 
was  no  sign  of  any  break  between  them. 

In  the  administration  of  the  State  Department  Bryan 
contributed  nospecial  training  and  no  unusual  understand- 
ing  oi  the  problems.  Technical  matters  were_carried  oh 
by  the  permanent  staff.  Minor  officials  in  the  diplomatic 
serviceTweFe  promoted  and  transferred  as  consistently  as  the 
law  allowed.  The  chief  ambassadors  and  ministers  were 
as  usual  allowed  to  retire,  and  their  successors  were  ap 
pointed  directly  from  civil  life.  In  the  more  important 
posts  men  of  letters  or  active  partisans  replaced  Republican 
predecessors.  The  editor  of  World's  Work,  Walter  Hines 
Page,  was  sent  to  the  Court  of  St.  James,  Thomas  Nelson 
Page  to  Rome,  Brand  Whitlock  to  Brussels,  Henry  van 
Dyke  to  The  Hague,  and  James  W.  Gerard,  a  wealthy 


424     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

New  York  judge,  to  Berlin.  It  was  commonly  believed 
that  the  President  gave  the  leadirtg  title^n~His~Cabinet 
to  Bryan,  but  retained  control  of  the  diplomatic  policies 
of  the  State  Department  himself. 

A  few  days  before  the  change  in  administrations  Mexico 
underwent  another  of  her  periodic  revolutions,  and  a  mili- 
Mexican  tary  dictator,  Victoriano  Huerta,  assumed  the 
Revolution  executive  power,  displacing  Francisco  I.  Madero, 
whose  own  title  had  been  based  on  successful  revolution. 
For  thirty-five  years,  until  1911,  Mexico  enjoyed  toler 
able  tranquillity  under  the  heavy  hand  of  General  Porfirio 
Diaz,  dictator  and  President.  In  the  Diaz  regime  Mexico 
came  nearer  to  the  United  States  as  railroads  crossed  the 
Rio  Grande  and  penetrated  the  highlands  of  the  Latin 
Republic.  Foreigners  were  encouraged  to  take  concessions 
for  the  development  of  Mexican  resources.  Mining  and 
railroad  construction  were  promoted,  and  in  later  years, 
when  oil  was  discovered  in  the  State  of  Tamaulipas,  petro 
leum  concessions  were  granted  in  the  Tampico  district. 
Foreign  industry  found  it  possible  to  do  business  under  the 
Diaz  regime  and  the  disorder  that  had  formerly  existed  along 
the  Rio  Grande  was  rigorously  repressed.  By  a  semblance 
of  popular  government  Diaz  reflected  himself  term  after 
term,  but  in  1911  he  fled  the  country  in  the  face  of  an 
agrarian  insurrection  that  brought  Madero  to  the  front. 
The  protests  of  the  Maderists  asserted  that  natural  re 
sources  had  been  misappropriated,  that  the  common  Mex 
ican  was  being  driven  from  his  land,  and  that  foreign 
capital  was  dominating  the  government.  The  Madero 
regime  was  never  peacefully  established  over  the  whole  re 
public.  On  February  18,  1913,  Madero  was  overturned  by 
a  military  conspiracy,  and  three  days  later  he  was  murdered 
amid  circumstances  that  suggested  that  the  new  dictator, 
Huerta,  was  guiltily  responsible.  Taft  took  no  step  re 
specting  Mexico  that  might  embarrass  his  successor  in 
handling  the  new  problem.  After  the  Maderist  revolt  he 
increased  the  number  of  regular  troops  stationed  along  the 
Rio  Grande  in  order  to  lessen  the  border  disturbance  that 


WATCHFUL  WAITING  425 

invariably  accompanied  Mexican  revolutions.  Texan,  New 
Mexican,  and  Arizona  towns,  with  considerable  Mexican 
population,  found  their  peace  and  safety  disturbed  as  plots 
were  hatched  in  them  for  execution  in  Mexico,  and  as 
Mexican  fugitives  and  pursuers  carried  their  fighting  across 
the  boundary  into  the  United  States. 

The  murder  of  Madero  gave  the  Huerta  Administration 
a  bad  start,  and  in  one  State  at  least  it  was  repudiated  from 
the  beginning.  In  Coahuila,  General  Venustiano  The  Huerta 
Carranza  refused  to  recognize  the  change,  and  Adminis- 
became  the  nucleus  of  an  anti-Huerta  movement. 
In  March,  1912,  under  the  stimulus  of  the  Mexican  revolt, 
Congress  authorized  the  President  to  endeavor  to  moderate 
domestic  violence  in  the  Latin  republics  by  forbidding  the 
export  of  arms  and  ammunition.  Operating  under  this  law 
Taft  endeavored  to  influence  the  course  of  the  revolution, 
with  the  result  that  the  Mexican  revolutionists  were  driven 
to  procure  their  supplies  in  Europe,  where  German  dealers 
were  entirely  willing  to  provide  them. 

One  of  the  first  tasks  of  Secretary  Bryan  was  that  of 
determining  what  to  do  with  Huerta.  The  American 
Ambassador  in  Mexico,  Harry  Lane  Wilson,  openly  sup 
ported  the  new  Government,  and  returned  to  Washington 
in  the  summer  to  report  that  the  alternative  for  Mexico 
was  Huerta  or  chaos.  The  Administration  repudiated  his 
conduct  in  the  early  days  of  the  revolution.  He  resigned 
his  post  in  August,  and  John  Lind,  of  Minnesota,  was  sent 
to  Mexico  as  a  confidential  agent  to  investigate  the  state  of 
affairs.  On  August  27  the  President  addressed  Congress 
upon  the  crisis,  indicating  his  determination  not  to  intervene, 
but  to  exert  a  "steady  pressure  of  moral  force"  for  the  re- 
establishment  of  peace.  Mexico  was  to  be  allowed  to  work 
out  her  own  problem,  with  the  United  States  in  a  position 
of  "watchful  waiting"  for  the  outcome.  In  October  the 
violent  dissolution  of  the  Mexican  Congress  by  Huerta 
evoked  the  announcement  that  the  United  States  would  not 
recognize  the  Huerta  Government  or  accept  the  approaching 
Mexican  election  as  constitutional.  An  American  Charge 


426     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

d' Affaires,  Nelson  O'Shaughnessy,  was  allowed  to  remain 
informally  in  Mexico,  where  all  of  theother  great  powers  had 
already  recognized  Huerta.  The  former  Ambassador  issued 
a  public  attack  upon  the  Mexican  policy  of  the  Adminis 
tration,  and  on  October  17,  1913,  President  Wilson  dis 
cussed  the  Latin-American  relationships  of  the  United 
States  in  a  speech  at  Mobile. 

The  "Mobile  Doctrine"  constituted  a  new  interpretation 
of  thre  Doctrine  of  Monroe.  The  diplomatic  interventions 
The  "  Mobile  of  the  United  States  in  the  affairs  of  Venezuela 
Doctrine"  ^y  Cleveland  in  1895  and  by  Roosevelt  in  1902 
were  welcomed  in  Latin  America  as  evidence  that  the 
Monroe  Doctrine  constituted  a  safeguard  against  attack, 
but  the  brusque  treatment  of  Colombia  in  1903  and  the 
prevention  of  her  recovery  of  Panama  aroused  deep  suspi 
cions  of  the  sincerity  of  the  United  States  when  its  own  ex 
pansion  was  involved.  The  special  missions  of  Root  and 
Knox  to  the  Latin  Americas  were  designed  to  allay  these 
suspicions,  which  were  revived  when  American  business 
interests,  aroused  by  the  Mexican  revolution,  began  to  de 
mand  an  intervention  "to  clean  up  Mexico."  Speaking  at 
Mobile,  President  Wilson  promised  that  the  United  States 
wpu]d .never  add  a.  foot  to  its  territory  bv  conquest,  and  ex 
pressed^  the.  hope  that  law  and  order  might  prevail  in  the 
neighboring  republics.  A  large  part  of  the  regular  army  con 
tinued  in  camp  along  the  Rio  Grande,  where  Texas  and  New 
Mexico  were  continually  demanding  protection. 

Huerta,  deprived  of  recognition  by  the  United  States, 
was  unable  to  procure  substantial  aid  from  other  countries 
Canal  since  these  were  unwilling  to  interfere  in  Ameri- 

treatywith  can  problems.  As  evidence  of  the  sincerity  of 

Colombia  •«««••«•  •  •  1 

the  Mobile  policy,  Bryan  signed  a  treaty  with 
Colombia  on  April  7,  1914,  regretting  that  the  relations  of 
the  countries  had  been  marred  in  1903,  and  providing  com 
pensation  to  Colombia  for  the  loss  of  the  Canal  Zone.  The 
treaty  remained  only  an  evidence  of  administrative  intent, 
as  the  Senate  did  not  ratify  it,  and  two  days  after  its  sig 
nature  an  episode  at  Tampico  tested  the  self-restraint  of 


WATCHFUL  WAITING  *  427 

"watchful  waiting."  An  American  naval  officer  with  a  few 
marines  was  arrested  by  the  Huerta  forces,  and  adequate 
apology  was  not  forthcoming.  A  military  and  naval  demon 
stration  was  at  once  prepared  against  Vera  Cruz.  "There 
can  in  what  we  do  be  no  thought  of  aggression  or  of  selfish 
aggrandizement,"  said  the  President  as  he  announced  the 
intervention  to  Congress  on  April  20,  1914.  "We  seek  to 
maintain  the  dignity  and  authority  of  the  United  States 
only  because  we  wish  always  to  keep  our  great  influence  un 
impaired  for  the  uses  of  liberty,  both  in  the  United  States  and 
wherever  else  it  may  be  employed  for  the  benefit  of  man 
kind."  In  both  parties  impatience  with  watchful  waiting 
was  pronounced.  Henry  Watterson  declared  for  war 
"because,  helpless  to  help  herself,  Mexico  has  become  a 
menace  to  us." 

With  Frank  F.  Fletcher  in  command  of  the  fleet  and 
Frederick  Funston  in  command  of  the  expeditionary  force 
Vera  Cruz  was  occupied  and  held  for  a  short  Mexican 
period.  The  "A.B.C."  powers— Argentina,  Bra-  intervention 
zil,  and  Chile  —  offered  their  services  as  mediators  between 
the  United  States  and  Mexico,  which  were  accepted  at  once. 
The  formal  satisfaction  for  the  insult  at  Tampico  was  never 
attained,  but  the  steady  pressure  upon  Huerta  accomplished 
its  result,  and  he  resigned  his  position  on  July  15,  1914. 
A  few  days  later  he  set  sail  for  Spain,  an  exile  from  his 
country.  But  peace  failed  to  be  established.  General 
Carranza  acceded  to  the  presidency,  while  disorder  con 
tinued  throughout  the  republic;  and  along  the  Rio  Grande 
life  and  property  remained  uncertain  because  of  revolu 
tionary  turbulence.  In  the  spring  of  1916  a  second  military 
intervention  took  place  in  an  attempt  to  capture  a  notorious 
bandit,  one  Francisco  Villa^  ThTs  time  the  whole  available 
force  of  the  regular  army  was  used,  and  the  National  Guard 
was  called  out  and  mobilized  along  the  border.  Villa  es 
caped,  the  invading  column  was  drawn  back  across  the 
Chihuahua  desert  to  El  Paso,  and  there  remained  nothing 
definite  in  the  Mexican  situation  except  the  fixed  determi 
nation  of  President  Wilson  not  to  take  advantage  of  the 


428     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

dissensions  in  the  neighboring  republic  or  to  restore  order 
there  by  force. 

The  patience  with  which  the  American  Government 
waited  for  Mexico  to  right  itself  and  resume  the  normal  ac 
tivities  of  government  was  unpopular  at  home  and  abroad. 
Not  only  was  the  revolution  pushing  across  the  border  en 
dangering  life  and  property  in  the  United  States,  but  within 
Mexico  property  was  destroyed  and  lives  of  foreigners 
needlessly  sacrificed.  The  European  countries,  whose  sub 
jects  were  suffering,  looked  to  the  United  States  for  diplo 
matic  guidance.  They  did  not  desire  to  arouse  American 
hostility  by  intervention,  yet  were  not  satisfied  to  watch 
the  losses  and  destruction  without  protest. 

The  cordial  relationships  that  had  existed  in  1909  be 
tween  the  United  States  and  the  rest  ofjthejv^Qrld  wgrejjeing 
undermined.  With  Japan  there  was  the  griev- 
isoLtion  of  ance  against  the  United  States  due  to  the  dis- 
criminations  which  California  desired  to  exert 
against  Japanese  subjects  with  reference  to  land 
tenure.  The  open  protest  of  the  National  Administration 
was  unable  to  prevent  the  passage  of  discriminatory  laws, 
which  Japan  believed  to  be  in  violation  of  her  treaties. 
With  Russia  there  was  no  treaty  in  existence  to  govern  com 
mercial  relationships.  That  Government  had  refused  to 
admit  American  citizens  who  happened  to  be  Jews,  and  in 
retaliation  the  United  States  denounced  the  Treaty  of 
1832,  in  1911.  The  Imperial  Government  showed  no  dis 
position  to  modify  its  determination  not  to  surrender  its 
control  over  aliens  admitted  into  the  empire,  and  the 
United  States  was  unwilling  to  recognize  an  explicit  dis 
crimination  against  any  class  of  American  citizens.  The 
refusal  of  the  Senate  to  approve  the  Taft  arbitration  treaty 
with  England  was  regretted  in  that  country,  but  was  much 
less  injurious  to  friendly  relationships  than  the  tolls  ex 
emption  clause  of  the  Canal  Act  of  August,  1912. 

The  United  States  was  drifting  into  a  £osition_  of. .isola 
tion  wheiTonJVIarc^  5.  iQrjTTresident  Wilson  appeared 
before  Congress  with  a  formal  request  for  the  repeal  of  the 


WATCHFUL  WAITING  429 

tolls  exemption  clause  urging  "the  justice,  the  wisdom, 
and  the  large  policy  of  such  a  repeal  with  the 

1  1        TT  11-       i     i  •    r     Repeal  of 

utmost   earnestness.         He  asserted   his    beliet    Panama 


that  the  exemption  policy  was  not  only  unsound 
in  an  economic  way,  but  was  "in  plain  contra 
vention"  of  the  Hay-Pauncefote  Treaty.  "We  are  too  big, 
too  powerful,  too  self-respecting  a  nation,"  he  urged,  "to 
interpret  with  a  too  strained  or  refined  reading  the  words  of 
our  own  promises  just  because  we  have  power  enough  to 
give  us  leave  to  read  them  as  we  please.  ...  I  ask  this  of 
you  in  support  of  the  foreign  policy  of  the  Administration. 
I  shall  not  know  how  to  deal  with  other  matters  of  even 
greater  delicacy  and  nearer  consequence  if  you  do  not 
grant  it  to  me  in  ungrudging  measure." 

The  inner  reasons  for  this  demand  on  Congress  were  not 
explained,  and  the  public  was  left  to  wonder  what  inter 
national  catastrophe  was  impending.  The  debate  on  the 
merits  of  repeal  divided  Congress  without  reference  to  par 
ties,  and  continued  bitterly  for  three  months.  The  ca 
nal  itself,  meanwhile,  was  finished.  On  April  i,  1914,  Gen 
eral  Goethals  became  civil  governor  of  the  Canal  Zone  and 
a  few  days  later  a  barge  service  was  inaugurated  through 
the  canal.  The  date  for  the  formal  opening  was  set  for 
August  15. 

The  tolls  repeal  act  passed  the  House  before  the  end  of 
March  and  in  the  Senate  was  officially  defended  by  Hoke 
Smith,  of  Georgia,  formerly  Secretary  of  the  Interior  under 
Cleveland.  Its  ablest  support  came  from  Elihu  Root, 
while  the  non-partisan  nature  of  the  debate  was  revealed 
by  the  fact  that  O'Gorman,  of  New  York,  chairman  of  the 
Senate  Committee  on  Oceanic  Canals  led  in  opposing  it. 
Some  Senators  who  were  reluctant  to  repeal  the  clause  and 
to  concede  its  inequity  urged  that  the  matter.be  referred  to 
arbitration  under  the  existing  treaty  with  England.  On 
J  une_I5  the  repealjict^  became  a  law. 

The  diplomatic  policylndTcated  by  the  Mobile  speech  and 
the  repeal  of  the  tolls  exemption  clause  was  one  of  self- 
restraint  and  fair  play,  which  received  wider  interpretation 


430      RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

as  Secretary  Bryan  undertook  the  negotiation  of  a  series  of 
arbitration  treaties  with  the.  w^Hd'at  large.  Bryan,  like 
most  Americans,  was  the  sort  of  a  friend  of  peace  whom  it 
was  easy  for  the  unthinking  critic  to  confuse  with  the  the 
oretical  pacifist.  In  no  sense  a  non-resistant,  he  believed 
war  to  be  always  an  evil,  and  that  it  ought  to  be  avoided 
in  every  possible  case.  He  was  sharply  at  variance  with 
those  who  advocated  large  armies  and  navies  as  a  means  of 
defense,  maintaining  that  these  were  in  reality  a  provoca 
tion  of  war.  He  urged  as  a  substitute  for  this  type  of  prepa 
ration  international  good  faith  based  upon  arbitral  agree 
ments.  More  than  thirty  nations  accepted  his  proposals 
in  substance.  "The  high  contracting  parties  agree,"  the 
opening  article  of  each  treaty  ran,  "that  all  disputes  be 
tween  them,  of  every  nature  whatsoever,  shall,  when  diplo 
matic  methods  of  adjustment  have  failed,  be  referred  for 
investigation  and  report  to  a  permanent  international  com 
mission  .  .  .  and  agree  not  to  declare  war  or  begin  hostili 
ties  during  such  investigation  and  before  the  report  is  sub 
mitted." 

The  Senate  ratified  most  of  these  treaties  without  delay, 
and  their  negotiator  regarded  them  as  a  potent  means  of 
maintaining  peace.  The  special  arbitration  treaty  with 
Great  Britain,  due  to  expire  on  June  4,  1913,  was  renewed 
for  a  period  of  five  years. 

Diplomatic  attempts  were  made  to  improve  the  relations 
of  the  United  States  with  the  neighbors  in  the  Caribbean 
Central  region  and  resulted  in  more  definite  relationships 
American  with  Nicaragua  and  Haiti.  The  Colombian 

relations  r     .       ..  ..          •         i        <- 

treaty  of  April  7  was  pending  in  the  Senate, 
when  in  August,  1914,  a  treaty  was  signed  with  Nicaragua 
inspired  in  part  by  the  assertion  of  the  Minister  from 
Nicaragua  that  the  German  Government  was  bidding  for 
the~control  of  the  potential  canal  route  across  his  country. 
In  accordance  with  this  agreement  the  United  States,  for 
the  sum  of  three  million  dollars  in  gold,  acquiredjthe  owner- 
shi_p_of  t]^eJS[icaragua_right _of  way  between  the  two  oceans. 
In  addition  it  acquired  the  control  of  islands  for  naval 


WATCHFUL  WAITING  431 

bases  in  the  Caribbean  and  of  shore  rights  on  the  Gulf  of 
Fonseca.  The  purchase  money  was  to  be  administered 
jointly  "for  the  advancement  of  the  welfare  of  Nicaragua," 
and  in  the  control  of  its  expenditure  the  United  States 
acquired  rights  inferior  to  those  of  the  protectorate  plan  of 
1910,  but  quite  sufficient  to  influence  the  course  of  that 
republic. 

The  purchase  of  the  Nicaragua  right  of  way,  which  the 
Senate  ratified  in  1916,  failed  to  moderate  the  Central 
American  suspicion  of  the  United  States.  Both  Costa 
Rjcajand  Salvador  had  interests  in  either  the  right _of__ w ay 
itself  or  the  Gulf  of  Fonseca  at  its  western  end.  They 
brought  suit  for  redress  in  the  Central  American  Supreme 
Court  that  the  United  States  had  urged  them  to  found,  but 
got  no  redress  because  that  body  was  without  jurisdiction 
over  the  United  States.  It  was  their  claim  that  Nicaragua 
had  no  power  to  dispose  of  a  canal  right  without  their  con 
sent.  The  Government  of  Haiti  was  reestablished  as  an 
American  protectorate  by  a  treaty  of  September  .1.6, _  191 5. 
Its  finances  were  brought  under  American  control,  and 
American  naval  forces  were  called  upon  to  assist  in  maintain 
ing  order  here  as  in  Santo  Domingo,  Nicaragua,  and  Hon 
duras.  In  the  Caribbean,  as  in  Mexico,  the  dilemma 
remained  unsolved.  It  was  impracticable  to  secure  the 
cordial  friendship  of  the  Latin-American  countries  without 
treating  them  as  equals  and  keeping  hands  off  their  affairs. 
It  was  impossible  for  them,  with  their  own  resources,  to 
maintain  the  standard  of  public  order  and  security  to  life 
and  property  prevalent  in  the  United  States  or  Europe.  A 
growing  consciousness  that  European  powers  might  not 
indefinitely  tolerate  Latin-American  disorder  made  the  di 
lemma  a  practical  one  admitting  of  no  evasion. 

While  the  tolls  repeal  bill  was  in  its  last  stages  in  Congress 
and  General  Goethals  was  preparing  for  the  inauguration  of 
commerce  through  the  canal,  another  great  canal    opening  of 
was  being  brought  into  service.      At  Kiel  the    Panama  and 
German  Emperor,  William  II,  opened  the  en 
larged  canal  between  the  Baltic  and  the  North  Sea.     At 


432     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  )  STATES 

the  original  opening  of  this  canal  in  1895,  a  tew  ships  in  the 
American  White  Squadron  took  part  in  the  celebration.  In 
the  years  ensuing  the  canal  became  a  part  of  Germany's 
naval  establishment,  and  German  battleships  that  could 
now  take  safe  refuge  in  the  Baltic  were  floated  in  increasing 
numbers  'in  conscious  rivalry  to  those  of  England.  The 
first  battleship  of  the  dreadnaught  class  placed  in  commis 
sion  by  England  in  1906  made  the  Kiel  Canal  obsolete  as 
an  adjunct  to  warfare  because  no  ship  of  dreadnaught  di 
mensions  could  be  passed  through  its  locks.  Its  rebuilding 
on  a  larger  scale  was  immediately  undertaken,  while  the 
keels  of  German  dreadnaughts  were  laid  down  in  the  years 
after  1906;  but  until  the  enlarged  canal  was  ready  for  use 
the  power  of  the  German  navy  was  maimed.  The  formal 
reopening  in  the  week  ending  on  July  i,  1914,  was  believed 
by  Germany  to  be  the  forerunner  of  great  events.  The 
latter  days  of  the  festivities,  however,  were  marred  by  the 
news  that  Archduke  Francis  Ferdinand,  Crown  Prince  of 
Austria,  had  been  murdered  at  Sarajevo  on  June  28.  The 
train  of  events  that  this  precipitated,  made  possible,  if  not 
promoted,  by  the  fact  that  the  Kiel  Canal  was  open,  brought 
new  problems  in  the  next  few  weeks  to  test  the  sincerity  of 
the  American  Government  in  its  professions  of  fair  play  and 
peace. 

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL  NOTE 

Robinson  and  West,  The  Foreign  Policy  of  Woodrow  Wilson  (1917), 
contains  a  useful  commentary  upon  the  State  papers  of  the  Administra 
tion.  Upon  the  Mexican  problem  there  is  interesting  descriptive  material 
in  Edith  Coues  O'Shaughnessy,  A  Diplomat's  Wife  in  Mexico  (1916),  and 
Diplomatic  Days  in  Mexico  (1917).  The*  Central  American  topics  are 
covered  in  Dana  G.  Munro,  The  Five  Republics  of  Central  America  (1918) ; 
Chester  Lloyd  Jones,  The  Caribbean  Interests  of  the  United  States  (1917); 
and  Joseph  B.  Bishop,  The  Panama  Gateway  (1913).  Albert  Bushnell 
Hart,  The  Monroe  Doctrine  (1915),  is  a  judicious  and  comprehensive  su 
mary. 


CHAPTER  XLIV 

NEUTRALITY  AND  PREPAREDNESS 

THE  murder  of  the  Austrian  Archduke  was  interpreted  as 
an  episode  in  the  Pan-Slav  struggle  in  the  Balkans  to  ob 
struct  the  Pan-German  pressure  toward  Con-  The  World 
stantinople  and  the  East,  with  its  accompanying  War 
idea  of  a  Central  Europe  under  German  influence.  By  an 
nexing  Bosnia  and  Herzegovina  in  1908  the  Dual  Monarchy 
had  added  fuel  to  the  Slavic  grievances  in  general  and  those 
of  Serbia  in  particular.  The  suspicion  that  the  murder 
was  cue  to  a  Serbian  plot  gave  pretext  for  an  Austrian  at 
tack  o  remove  forever  the  obstacles  to  Teutonic  advance 
in  the  region  of  the  Bosphorus.  Great  Britain  was  on  the 
verge  of  civil  war,  with  Ulster  armed  and  angry.  Russia 
appealed  to  be  in  the  throes  of  revolutionary  movements, 
the  ;  tgrowth  of  the  partial  revolution  of  1905.  France 
gave  aiperficial  evidence  of  decay  within  her  government 
and  arny.  The  United  States,  far  removed  from  European 
concens,  was  on  the  verge  of  war  with  Mexico  and  perhaps 
japan.  An  overbearing  ultimatum  addressed  by  Austria 
to  SerHa  on  July  23,  1914,  was  expected  to  produce  not  sat- 
isfactioi,  but  a  cause  for  war.  Five  days  later  the  bom- 
bardmnt  of  Belgrade  began  and  within  the  next  few  days 
the  W»rld  War  became  a  fact. 

Oneby  one  the  European  powers  were  drawn  in.  Russia 
mobijzed  in  defense  of  Serbia  and  France  followed  to  be 
prepc  ad  for  contingencies  in  the  event  of  a  Russian  war. 
The  i  erman  Empire,  which  had  approved  the  ultimatum 
in  a<*rance  and  underwritten  its  consequences,  mobilized 
agaii  t  Russia  and  France,  and  exerted  all  its  diplomatic 
powet  to  persuade  England  to  stand  aloof.  The  British 
fleet  Assembled  for  a  great  review  off  Spithead  on  July  20, 
.was  eld  together  after  the  review  in  control  of  the  Eng 
lish  vhannel.  The  great  powers  went  to  war  beginning 


434     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  SI 

August  I .    On  the  following  day  the  German  fon  -s  crossec 
the  Belgian  frontier  en  route  to  France. 

The  invasion  of  Belgium,  a  neutralized  state,  wh' 
tus  Germany  like  the  other  European  powers  was  under 
contract  to  respect,  aroused  the  world  as  no  other  fact  since 
the  Crusades  had  done.  It  shifted  the  issue  at  nee  from 
the  immediate  merits  of  the  controversy  between  Teutons 
and  Slavs  to  the  larger  issue  of  world  peace,  and  shifted  the 
original  combatants  in  the  struggle,  Austria  and  ^erbia,  to 
an  inferior  rank,  as  the  German  Empire  assumed  the  position 
of  aggressor  against  a  peaceful  world  for  the  carr  mg  rut  of 
her  military  ambitions.  The  Belgian  forts,  Lie  and  the 
rest,  retarded  Germany's  advance  enough  to  spoil  the  -ch?me 
for  a  surprise  blow  upon  France  and  the  seizure  (  v  is  be 
fore  Russia  could  complete  her  mobilization.  Five  J 
later  Joffre  checked  the  German  armies  at  the  Marre  and 
Europe  settled  down  to  a  war  of  exhaustion  tha'  involved 
the  world. 

The  course  for  the  United  States  to  take  in  tr 
long  been  established  by  precedent  and  theory,      i      mod- 
American        ern  doctrine  of  neutrality  was  an  Americ  n  idea 
neutrality       tkat  Washington  had  conceived  an« 
phrased  in  1793.     The  American  Neutrality  A.     <f  1794 
was  the  foundation  of  all  such  acts  wherever  the  , 
and  the  progress  of  international  law  thereafl 
largely  to  the  insistence  of  neutral  states,  gene 
American  leadership  and  demanding  that  bell 
spect  their  rights  and  property,  and  leave  therr 

American  insistence  upon  the  rights  of  neutr 
also  an  acceptance  of  the  duties  of  neutrals  to 
Proclamations    of  neutrality  were    issued  by  t- 
States   as   succeeding   powers   entered    the   w 
August  1 8  the  President  addressed  the  nation 
titude  to  the  struggle.     It  was  too  early  to  foi 
view  of  the  general  drift  of  the  war,  and  auth 
of  its  conduct  were  hardly  yet  available.     It  s 
to  be  a  war  of  Europe  which  Americans  might 
the  normal  outcome  of  the  competitive  milit  ;ara- 


NEUTRALITY  AND  PREPAREDNESS  435 

tions  .of  the  combatants.  From  the  information  at  hand 
the  President  could  say  that  "it  is  entirely  within  our  own 
choice  what  its  effects  upon  us  will  be" ;  and  he  went  on  to 
urge  American  citizens,  drawn  most  of  them  from  the  na 
tions  at  war,  to  keep  down  their  passions,  restrain  their 
partisanship,  and  think  first  of  the  United  States,  "a  nation 
that  neither  sits  in  judgment  upon  others,  nor  is  disturbed 
in  her  own  councils,  and  which  keeps  herself  fit  and  free  to 
do  what  is  honest  and  disinterested,  and  truly  serviceable 
for  the  peace  of  the  world." 

The  first  acts  of  neutrality  comprised  friendly  services 
to  the  belligerents.  The  American  Ambassadors  at  Lon 
don,  Berlin,  Paris,  St.  Petersburg,  and  Rome  Friendly 
were  accepted  as  custodians  of  the  deserted  em-  services 
bassies  of  the  various  belligerents,  and  were  at  once  en 
gaged  in  relief  work  for  the  benefit  of  distressed  non-com 
batants  who  found  themselves  in  enemy  country  when  the 
war  broke  out.  As  the  German  troops  overran  Belgium 
and  the  National  Government  retreated  from  Brussels, 
Brand  Whitlock  and  the  Spanish  Ambassador  remained  at 
their  posts  as  Washburne  had  done  at  Paris  in  1870,  not 
only  to  represent  their  nations,  but  to  serve  mankind.  The 
American  embassies,  undermanned  at  best,  organized  emer 
gency  groups  of  assistants,  picking  up  Americans  who 
chanced  to  be  in  Europe  and  using  them  in  the  relief  work. 
Thousands  of  Americans  found  themselves  stranded  in  a 
world  at  war.  To  relieve  these  an  American  warship  was 
immediately  dispatched  with  a  store  of  American  gold  that 
Congress  appropriated  at  once.  The  relief  of  belligerent 
subjects  was  hardly  started  before  there  began  to  pour 
across  the  Belgian  frontiers  and  across  the  Channel  into 
England  a  stream  of  Belgian  refugees.  Dispossessed  by  a 
lawless  invader,  with  their  homes  destroyed  and  lives  need 
lessly  lost,  the  condition  of  the  Belgians  helped  to  crystallize 
neutral  opinion  as  to  the  merits  of  the  war.  The  American 
relief  committee  in  London  was  organized  under  the  leader 
ship  of  an  American  mining  engineer,  Herbert  C.  Hoover, 
and  out  of  it  there  developed  in  October  the  C.R.B.  —  the 


436     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

Commission  for  the  Relief  of  Belgium  —  into  whose  hands 
the  life  of  the  Belgian  civil  population  was  entrusted. 

American  public  opinion  was  stunned  by  the  fact  of  war, 
and  accepted  with  approval  the  statements  of  neutrality, 
Censorship  which  were  harmonious  at  once  with  American 
and  propa-  policy  and  with  the  conditions  of  general  ig 
norance  respecting  European  affairs  that  pre 
vailed  over  most  of  the  United  States.  It  was  some  months 
before  Colonel  Roosevelt  and  his  friends  voiced  the  con 
trary  doctrine,  that  "neutrality  is  at  best  a  drab-colored, 
selfish,  and  insignificant  virtue,  even  when  it  is  a  virtue;  and 
it  is  often  a  particularly  obnoxious  vice."  It  became  difficult, 
to  get  authentic  facts  upon  which  to  form  a  judgment. 
Newspaper  correspondents  were  not  welcome  in  the  war 
zone,  official  censors  colored  the  stories  that  were  given  out, 
and  the  British  Government  controlled  the  European  cable 
terminals  and  mails.  Propaganda  took  the  place  of  news 
so  far  as  the  belligerents  were  concerned,  and  American 
opinion  became  skeptical  as  to  the  reliability  of  facts  as 
printed.  On  August  10  a  group  of  Americans  of  German 
ancestry  brought  out  the  first  issue  of  the  weekly,  The 
Fatherland,  in  the  interest  of  the  Central  Powers.  In  a 
poem  directed  to  " William  II,  Prince  of  Peace,"  the  editor 
himself  cried  out: 

"But  thy  great  task  will  not  be  done 

Until  thou  vanquish  utterly 
The  Norman  brother  of  the  Hun, 
England,  the  Serpent  of  the  Sea." 

The  German  propaganda  in  America  devoted  itself  to  a 
blackening  of  the  fame  of  England,  and  to  a  unification  of 
the  Germans  in  the  United  States.  There  were  of  these,  in 
1910,  8,712,149  either  born  in  Germany  or  with  one  parent 
born  there.  Since  the  visit  of  Prince  Henry  of  Prussia  and 
the  formation  of  the  National  German-American  Alliance 
in  1902  the  organization  of  this  group  had  been  o^htened 
and  extended.  The  Fatherland  attempted  t;-f  ;.U  it 

on  the  basis  of  anti-British  feeling  the  Americans  (HA     .'53 
extraction,  who,  since  the  Fenian  movement,  had  c 


NEUTRALITY  AND  PREPAREDNESS  437 

ently  opposed  acts  of  agreement  with  Great  Britain  and 
who  were  already  partially  organized  in  the  American  Truth 
Society  to  fight  the  rapprochement  due  to  the  termination 
of  a  hundred  years  of  peace. 

On  the  other  side  of  the  debate  centers  of  influence  were 
soon  visible,  a  few  inspired  by  sympathy  with  England,  but 
most  of  them  judging  the  war  from  the  basis  of  prp- Allies 
the  invasion  of  Belgium,  the  expulsion  of  non-  °Pmion 
combatants,  the  reign  of  frightfulness  at  Louvain  and  else 
where,  and  the  deliberate  bombardment  of  the  cathedral  at 
Rheims.  For  these  the  cause  of  the  Central  Powers  was  a 
wicked  cause.  When  on  September  5,  1914,  Russia,  Great 
Britain,  and  France  signed  an  agreement  that  none  of  the 
three  would  "conclude  peace  separately  during  the  present 
war"  and  became  by  this  fact  the  Allies,  the  Americans 
who  detested  the  acts  of  Germany  became  known  as  the 
"pro-Allies."  The  great  body  of  Americans  in  1914,  how 
ever,  stood  aloof  from  the  active  controversy  of  propaganda, 
content  with  their  traditional  neutrality. 

The  Great  War,  coming  on  top  of  the  canal  tolls  dispute 
and  the  Mexican  crisis,  disturbed  the  tranquillity  with 
which  Congress  applied  itself  to  the  legislative  tasks  before 
it.  In  spite  of  the  ^distractions  thus  promoted,  the  anti 
trust  legislation  was  advanced  to  a  conclusion,  and  on 
October  24  Congress  adjourned  after  the  longest  continuous 
session  on  record.  The  Clayton  Anti-Trust  Law  was  com 
pleted,  and  the  Federal  Trade  Commission  was  immedi 
ately  launched,  while  the  federal  reserve  system  authorized 
the  year  before  was  ready  to  open  its  reserve  banks  ia 
November. 

The  Tariff  Act  of  1913  was  in  operation,  but  called  for 
unforeseen  amendment  because  of  the  war  in  Europe.     Im 
ports  from  the  Central  Powers  were  immediately    War 
restricted  by  the  Allied  blockades  while  Allied    revenue 
shippin^    rjimd    itself   speedily   diverted    from 
Am  tn,  PC  to  troop  transport  and  other  national  serv- 

ic'<r  American  imports  fell  away  and  the  tariff  revenue 
derived  from  them  was  lessened  nearly  ninety  million  dol- 


438     RECENT  HISTORY*  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

lars  during  the  fiscal  year  1914-15.  In  anticipation  of  this 
emergency  a  war  revenue  bill  was  put  through  Congress, 
designed  to  produce  one  hundred  million  dollars  extra 
revenue  chiefly  by  internal  taxation,  and  became  a  law 
October  22.  It  was  preceded  in  enactment  by  a  ship 
registry  law  inspired  by  the  war-time  crisis,  and  permitting 
merchant  ships  of  foreign  ownership  to  be  transferred  to 
American  registry.  The  war  revealed  the  fact  that  the 
United  States  was  at  the  mercy  of  the  world  for  the  carriage 
of  its  ocean  freights.  The  cotton  crop  of  1914  piled  up  at 
Southern  terminals  because  of  lack  of  ships  to  carry  it 
abroad.  Another  shipping  bill  was  introduced  providing 
for  the  erection  of  a  United  States  Shipping  Board  with 
power  to  purchase,  equip,  maintain,  and  operate  a  merchant 
fleet.  This  project  remained  under  debate  for  more  than 
two  years,  before  its  final  passage  in  1916;  but  a  war-risk 
bill  was  signed  September  2,  1914,  authorizing  the  Treasury 
Department  to  control  the  extortionate  rates  of  the  com 
mercial  insurance  companies  by  establishing  a  Bureau  of 
War  Risk  Insurance  to  underwrite  these  risks  at  a  reason 
able  price. 

Congress  adjourned  only  ten  days  before  the  November 
election  at  which  the  Sixty-Fourth  Congress  was  to  be 
Democratic  selected.'  For  two  years  the  majority  party, 
successes,  held  together  by  the  strictest  of  discipline,  had 
enacted  the  program  demanded  by  progressive 
citizens  regardless  of  party.  Early  in  the  spring  of  1914 
the  Democratic  National  Committee,  with  "unwonted 
democratic  forehandedness,"  began  the  issue  of  campaign 
literature  setting  forth  "a  record  of  achievement."  The 
Progressive  Party  had  begun  to  evaporate.  Many  of  its 
members  found  themselves  able  to  support  the  Democratic 
program  and  others  relapsed  into  the  Republican  organiza 
tion  where  they  were  welcomed  back.  The  Progressive 
vote  in  1914  was  so  unimportant  as  to  make  the  contest  one 
between  the  two  old  parties,  and  to  raise  a  clear  issue  as  to 
whether  Democratic  control  could  be  founr1  '  majority 

votes.     In  Pennsylvania,  where  Roosevelt  had  carried  the 


NEUTRALITY  AND  PREPAREDNESS  439 

primaries  before  him  in  1912,  there  were  three  candidates  in 
a  senatorial  contest.  Boies  Penrose,  one  of  the  inner  group 
of  " stand-pat"  Republicans,  gained  the  election  directly 
from  the  people,  over  the  Democrat,  A.  Mitchell  Palmer, 
and  Gifford  Pinchot,«the  Progressive  candidate.  The  Dem 
ocratic  leaders  in  the  Congressional  election  made  what 
use  they  could  of  the  World  War  and  the  American  disposi 
tion  toward  neutrality.  They  printed  on  their  campaign 
literature  the  text,  "War  in  the  East.  Peace  in  the  West. 
Thank  God  for  Wilson!"  The  Democrats  became  for  the 
time  being  a  majority  party  as  a  result  of  the  election,  with 
a  lead  of  nearly  thirty  votes  in  the  House  over  the  combined 
Republicans  and  Progressives,  and  of  fourteen  in  the  Senate. 
When  the  new  session  opened  in  December,  1914,  further 
statements  were  received  from  the  President  as  to  the  effect 
of  the  war  upon  the  United  States. 

As  the  leading  neutral  in  the  war,  and  particularly  be 
cause  of  American  dependence  upon  foreign  merchant 
marine,  the  United  States  developed  a  list  of  American 
grievances  against  the  belligerents  and  notably  gnevances 
against  those  whose  power  lay  on  the  high  seas.  The  naval 
power  of  the  Allies  surrounded  the  water  entrances  to  Ger 
many  with  a  blockade  whose  effectiveness  was  soon  com 
plete,  but  whose  powers  were  exercised  chiefly  in  connection 
with  the  belligerent  rights  of  contraband  and  search.  The 
Declaration  of  London,  formulated  in  1909  for  the  purpose 
of  codifying  the  rules  of  maritime  law,  had  not  been  ratified, 
and  the  practice  of  the  powers  reverted  to  the  unwritten 
principles  of  international  law.  Under  the  law  of  blockade 
it  would  have  been  permissible  for  the  Allied  warships  to 
cut  off  all  trade  with  German  ports  and  to  confiscate  as  law 
ful  prize  all  vessels  attempting  to  evade  the  blockade.  The 
Allies  refrained  from  exercising  this  privilege  because  of  its 
inadequacy.  With  German  ports  closed,  there  developed 
at  once  an  increase  in  the  imports  of  Italy,  Holland,  and 
Scandinavia,  whose  ports  were  not  subject  to  blockade  and 
from  whose  territory,  by  land  routes,  neutral  supplies  could 
find  their  way  to  German  and  Austrian  consumers.  Since 


440     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

no  right  to  blockade  neutral  ports  was  recognized,  a  block 
ade  of  German  ports  could  at  beet  divert  the  traffic,  but 
could  not  stop  it. 

The  law  of  contraband  was  elaborated  to  suit  the  needs 
of  the  existing  war,  and  precedents  created  by  the  United 
States  during  the  Civil  War  were  produced  by  the  Allies 
to  sustain  the  correctness  of  the  practice.  During  the  Civil 
War,  American  naval  vessels  had  seized  munitions  en  route 
from  Europe  to  British  ports  in  the  Bahamas,  to  Havana, 
or  to  Matamoros  in  northern  Mexico.  The  United  States 
Supreme  Court  upheld  these  seizures  as  lawful  because  the 
destination  of  the  contraband  was  clearly  to  aid  the  enemy. 
The  Anglo-British  Claims  Convention  after  the  Civil  War 
did  not  overturn  them.  They  were  now  cited  to  justify 
the  seizure  of  contraband  destined  for  Germany,  though 
billed  to  Copenhagen  or  Rotterdam  or  some  other  neutral 
port.  When  the  German  Empire  perfected  its  organization 
so  that  the  whole  nation  was  mobilized  for  war,  and  the 
distinction  between  combatant  and  non-combatant  disap 
peared,  the  Allies  enlarged  the  list  of  contraband,  contend 
ing  that  any  supplies  destined  for  the  civil  population  of 
Germany  were  in  reality  supplies  of  war.  The  growing  use 
of  cotton  for  explosives  brought  that  commodity  within  the 
contraband  list. 

In  addition  to  the  vexatious  enlargement  of  the  contra 
band  list,  the  Allies  exercised  the  right  of  search  in  a  new 
form,  taking  neutral  vessels  into  port  in  order  to  examine 
them,  and  seizing  and  searching  the  mails  they  carried  for 
the  light  they  might  throw  upon  enemy  operations.  Ameri 
can  protests  began  early  against  these  practices,  and  were 
continuing  with  increasing  acerbity  when  Germany  ad 
vanced  a  view  of  maritime  law  whose  novelty  and  horror 
forced  the  Allied  excesses  into  obscurity. 

The  submarine  boat  was  an  American  invention  that  all 
countries  had  adopted  as  a  part  of  their  naval  establish- 
The  sub-  ments.  On  February  4,  1915,  the  German  Gov- 
marine  ernment,  having  alreadv  protested  because  the 

United  States  failed  to  compel  the  Allies  to  n-bj.-ct  the 


NEUTRALITY  AND  PREPAREDX  441 

American  view  of  neutral  rights,  so  useful  to  the  Central  Pow 
ers,  announced  a  war  zone  about  the  British  Isles,  within 
which,  beginning  on  February  18,  they  proposed  to  use  sub 
marines  to  sink  and  destroy  "every  enemy  merchant  ship 
.  .  .  even  if  it  is  impossible  to  avert  dangers  which  threaten 
the  crew  and  passengers."  No  right  of  indiscriminate  de 
struction  of  merchant  shipping  has  ever  existed  or  been 
claimed  and  this  proposed  policy  was  conceded  to  be  in  ex 
cess  of  law  and  was  justified  only  as  a  retaliation  directed 
against  England.  Before  it  became  operative  Submarine 
the  German  Government  was  warned  by  the  ™ar 
United  States  as  to  the  possible  consequences  in  case 
American  merchant  vessels  or  American  citizens  should 
be  lost.  "  It  is,  of  course,  not  necessary  to  remind  the  Ger 
man  Government  that  the  sole  right  of  a  belligerent  in  deal 
ing  with  neutral  vessels  on  the  high  seas  is  limited  to  visit 
and  search  unless  a  blockade  is  proclaimed  and  effectively 
maintained,  which  this  Government  does  not  understand 
to  be  proposed  in  this  case.  To  declare  or  exercise  a  right 
to  attack  and  destroy  any  vessel  entering  a  prescribed  area 
of  the  high  seas  without  first  determining  its  belligerent 
nationality  and  the  contraband  character  of  its  cargo 
would  be  an  act  so  unprecedented  in  naval  warfare  that 
this  Government  is  reluctant  to  believe  that  the  Imperial 
Government  of  Germany  in  this  case  contemplates  it  as 
possible."  The  German  Government  was  warned  that  it 
would  be  held  to  ua  strict  accountability"  for  «Strict 
any  acts  that  might  result,  and  that  the  United  account- 
States  would  do  what  might  be  necessary  uto 
safeguard  American  lives  and  property  and  to  secure  to 
American  citizens  the  full  enjoyment  of  their  acknowl 
edged  rights  on  the  high  seas." 

Three  months  after  the  beginning  of  submarine  warfare 
the  catastrophe  that  had  been  foreseen  occurred.     On  May 
7,  1915,  the  British  liner,  Lusitania,  en  route  to    The  Lu- 
Liverpool,  was  sunk  off  the  coast  of  Ireland  with-    sitania 
out  warning  by  a  German  submarine.    Among  the  1200  lost 
were  114  Americans,  including  women  and  children,  whose 


442     RECENT  H 

destruction  was  denounced  that  night  by  Colonel  Roosevelt 
as  "an  act  of  piracy,"  and  convinced  the  nation  of  the  im 
minence  of  war. 

In  three  notes  directed  to  Germany  after  the  sinking  of 
the  Lusitania  President  Wilson  sought  to  bring  that  nation 
to  an  abandonment  of  her  submarine  policy  and  to  lead  his 
country  to  a  clear  understanding  of  the  crisis.  The  second 
note,  dated  June  9,  produced  the  resignation  of  Bryan  from 
the  Cabinet  because  of  his  unwillingness  to  be  responsible 
for  war,  should  it  occur.  "Nothing  but  actual  forcible  re 
sistance  or  continued  efforts  to  escape  by  flight  when  or 
dered  to  stop,"  ran  the  argument  of  the  second  note,  .  .  . 
"has  ever  been  held  to  forfeit  the  lives  of  ...  passengers 
or  crew.  .  .  .  The  sinking  of  passenger  ships  involves  prin 
ciples  of  humanity  which  throw  into  the  background  any 
special  circumstances  of  detail ....  The  Government  of 
the  United  States  is  contending  .  .  .  for  nothing  less  high 
and  sacred  than  the  rights  of  humanity  .  .  .  [and]  cannot 
admit  that  the  proclamation  of  a  war  zone  .  .  .  may  be 
made  to  operate  as  in  any  degree  an  abbreviation  of  the 
rights  ...  of  American  shipmasters  or  of  American  citi 
zens.  .  .  ."  In  his  third  note  of  July  21,  for  the  replies  had 
been  evasive  and  unsatisfactory,  President  Wilson  warned 
Germany  that  a  repetition  of  the  outrage  would  be  con 
strued  as  "deliberately  unfriendly."  This  was  his  last 
word  upon  the  Lusitania,  and  on  the  same  day  he  directed 
the  Secretaries  of  War  and  Navy  to  take  up  the  prepara 
tion  of  plans  for  national  defense.  "W7ilson  has  lost  ninety 
per  cent  of  the  German-American  vote,"  complained  The 
Fatherland;  but  the  German  Government  heeded  the  warn 
ing  for  a  time  and  saw  to  it  that  no  outrage  of  similar  mag 
nitude  occurred  until  the  following  spring. 

The  Lusitania  affair  turned  the  National  Administration 
to  an  advocacy  of  measures  of  preparedness,  which  an 
Prepared-  earnest  minority  had  discussed  since  the  autumn 
ness  move-  of  1914.  The  attack  on  Belgium,  coming  with- 

ment  .  .  -,  •    i  , 

out  provo :  a  ~ """  ot'  t^>  what  iniorht 

happen  to  the  Unitet        it      a  nd  new  voices  were  heard  in 


NEUTRALITY  AND  PREPAREDNESS  443 

Congress  demanding  a  reconsideration  of  national  defense. 
"For  a  dozen  years,"  declared  Gardner,  of  Massachusetts, 
who  led  in  the  preparedness  movement,  "I  have  sat  here 
like  a  coward  in  silence  and  listened  while  men  have  told 
us  how  the  United  States  can  safely  depend  on  the  state 
militia  and  the  naval  reserve.  All  the  time  I  knew  that  it 
was  riot  true." 

The  fight  for  preparedness  was  waged  on  the  floor  of 
Congress,  in  the  press,  and  by  means  of  propagandist  soci 
eties.  The  NationalxSecurity  League,  organized  in  Decem 
ber,  1914,  took  up  a  work  that  the  Navy  League  had  been 
pressing  with  little  response  for  a  dozen  years.  In  August, 
1915,  the  more  intense  members  of  this  society  broke  away 
from  it  to  organize  the  American  Defense  Society  because 
the  National  Security  League  was  unwilling  to  denounce 
members  of  the  Democratic  Administration  for  failures  in 
preparedness.  The  American  Rights  Committee,  formed 
in  December,  1915,  was  still  more  extreme  and  demanded 
instant  warfare. 

The  National  Administration  was  unwilling  in  the  session 
of  1914-15  to  destroy  the  effect  of  its  stand  for  neutrality 
by  making  the  menace  of  warlike  preparations.  The  ad 
vocates  of  preparedness  were  denounced  variously  by  pro- 
Germans,  by  pacifists,  and  by  Americans  who  saw  in  pre 
paredness  only  another  aspect  of  the  conspiracy  of  big  busi 
ness.  Denunciations  of  the  manufacturers  of  munitions 
were  used  by  this  last  group  to  meet  arguments  for  national 
defense.  The  Administration  stood  aloof  from  the  actual 
controversy  until  the  discussion  of  the  Lusitania  wras  over. 
Thereafter  it  led  the  movement.  In  January,  1916,  Presi 
dent  Wilson  took  to  the  stump  to  urge  his  policies  of  pre 
paredness. 

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL  NOTE 

W.  H.  Hobbs,  The  Worl  t  War  and  its  Consequences  (1919),  is  one  of  the 
most  outspoken  summar'.es  of  the  period  of  neutrality,  is  strongly  anti- 
Wilson,  and  bears  a  la  ish  endorsement  from  Colonel  Roosevelt.  James 
VV.  Gerard,  My  Four  Years  in  Germany  (1917),  was  published  serially  in 
the  newspapers,  and  r  cquired  great  popularity  as  a  war  tract.  John  Bach 


444     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

McMaster,  The  United  States  in  the  World  War  (1918),  gives  a  detailed 
study  of  the  forces  at  play  upon  public  opinion.  Roland  G.  Usher,  The 
Story  of  the  Great  War  (1920),  is  a  popular  summary  of  the  whole  conflict, 
as  is  C.  J.  H.  Hayes,  A  Brief  History  of  the  Great  War  (1920).  Constance 
Gardner,  Some  Letters  of  Augustus  Peabndy  Gardner  (1920),  is  the  record 
of  an  early  and  consistent  advocate  of  preparedness. 


CHAPTER  XLV 

THE  ELECTION  OF  1916 

THE  debate  over  preparedness,  beginning  in  the  autumn  of 
1914,  extended  through  the  following  year  as  its  implica 
tions  came  to  be  understood,  until  at  last  it  Pacifist 
constituted  one  of  the  greatest  struggles  for  the  movements 
control  of  American  public  opinion.  The  preparedness 
societies  that  took  the  lead  in  presenting  the  case  were  fol 
lowed  by  propagandist  organizations  of  diverse  opinions, 
working  sometimes  in  secret  and  sometimes  in  the  open. 
The  need  for  preparedness  came  as  a  shock  to  the  bulk  of 
American  opinion,  whose  pacific  tendencies  prejudiced  it 
against  the  use  of  force.  An  American  League  to  Limit 
Armaments  was  organized  in  December,  1914,  under  the 
leadershTpTbT  anti-militarists  and  non-resistants.  A  year 
later  the  American  Union  Against  Militarism  appeared 
under  much  the  same  leadership,  but  more  completely 
under  the  control  of  Socialists  and  pacifists.  The  Women's 
Peace  Party,  formed  in  Washington  in  January,  1915,  with 
Jane  Addams  as  its  head,  conducted  an  active  campaign 
for  theoretical  peace,  and  dispatched  its  leader  to  Europe 
at  the  head  of  a  women's  delegation  to  try  to  stop  the  war. 
Individual  leaders  of  these  movements  gained  access  to  the 
well-known  motor  manufacturer,  Henry  Ford,  with  the  re 
sult  that  on  December  4,  1915,  the  Oscar  II,  chartered  by 
this  philanthropist,  sailed  for  Copenhagen  with  a  great 
delegation  of  peace  advocates  aboard,  "to  try  to  get  the 
boys  out  of  the  trenches  and  back  to  their  homes  by  Christ 
mas  day." 

By  the  end  of  1915  these  pacifist  societies  were  left  in  the 
control  of  Socialists   and  non-resistants,   while  the  more 
constructive  members  who  had  started  in  with    League  to 
them  switched  their  support  to  a  different  pro-    Enforce 
gram,  which  was  launched  in  Independence  Hall 
in  Philadelphia  on  June   17,    1915.     In  preceding  months 


446     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

groups  of  statesmen  in  England  and  America  worked  over 
rough  drafts  for  a  league  of  nations  which  should  produce 
peace  by  preventing  war,  and  by  providing  a. substitute 
for  war  as  a  means  of  settling  international  disputes.  It 
was  peace  backed  by  force  that  the  League  to  Enforce  Peace 
proposed.  Among  its  leaders  were  ex-President  Taft, 
A.  Lawrence  Lowell,  President  of  Harvard  University,  and 
Hamilton  Holt,  editor  of  the  Independent.  The  Independ 
ence  Hall  conference  issued  "a  declaration  of  interdepend 
ence"  that  was  widely  accepted  during  the  ensuing  months. 
A  year  later,  when  the  league  held  its  annual  meeting  in 
Washington,  its  general  program  received  the  support  of 
President  Wilson.  Before  the  end  of  1916  the  leaders  of 
all  the  responsible  belligerents  had  accepted  the  principle 
of  a  league  of  nations. 

The  bitter  debate  between  peace  and  preparedness  was 
made  more  difficult  to  follow  by  the  open  propaganda  of 
Munitions  German  sympathizers  and  secret  intrigue  ema 
embargoes  nating  from  the  German  Embassy  at  Washington. 
The  former  group,  adhering  to  the  cause  of  Germany  from 
the  opening  of  the  war,  denounced  "perfidious  Albion" 
and  devoted  themselves  particularly  to  the  attack  upon  the 
conditions  produced  by  the  British  naval  power.  Save  for  a 
handful  of  submarines  and  an  occasional  raider,  German 
vessels  were  swept  from  the  oceans  of  the  world.  The 
imports  of  food  and  munitions  were  cut  off  by  a  rigorous 
blockade  that  could  neither  be  broken  nor  evaded.  Unable 
to  avail  itself  of  the  right  conferred  by  international  law  to 
buy  munitions  in  neutral  countries  subject  to  the  right  of 
the  other  belligerent  to  intercept  them,  Germany  advanced 
the  novel  claim  that  it  was  unneutral  for  neutral  countries 
to  sell  such  munitions  to  the  other  belligerent.  To  German- 
Americans  this  statement  appeared  conclusive.  It  was  ac 
cepted  by  a  considerable  number  of  pacifists  and  by  many 
of  the  old  Progressives  who  had  schooled  themselves  to  a 
consistent  attack  upon  the  agencies  of  big  business,  and 
who  saw  in  the  munitions  trade  only  the  great  profits 
derived  from  manufactures  from  the  fact  of  war. 


THE  ELECTION  OF  1916  447 

Congress  was  under  continuous  pressure  not  only  to  com 
pel  England  to  accept  the  American  view  of  international 
law,  but  to  establish  an  embargo  upon  shipments  to  Great 
Britain  to  accomplish  this,  or  to  place  that  country  upon  an 
equality  of  opportunity  with  Germany.  On  January  20, 
1915,  Secretary  Bryan  in  a  long  letter  to  W.  J.  Stone,  chair 
man  of  the  Senate  Committee  on  Foreign  Relations,  de 
fended  the  neutrality  of  the  American  Government  and 
pointed  out  that  to  refuse  to  permit  the  Allies  to  buy  muni 
tions  in  America  would  involve  participation  by  the  United 
States  on  the  side  of  Germany,  and  would  be  quite  as 
unneutral  as  the  course  complained  of.  He  pointed  out, 
moreover,  the  sound  basis  for  the  lawfulness  of  trade  in 
munitions,  not  only  in  international  law,  but  also  in  the  fact 
that  otherwise  the  smaller  nations,  unable  to  manufacture 
their  own  supplies,  would  be  completely  at  the  mercy  of  the 
military  powers.  At  the  end  of  January  a  group  of  embargo 
advocates,  summoned  by  Bartholdt,  of  Missouri,  a  former 
Congressman  and  an  active  worker  for  peace,  held  a  con 
ference  in  Washington  and  organized  there  the  American 
Independence  Union.  An  active  part  was  taken~m  the 
movement  by  editors  of  German  and  Irish  papers,  and  the 
enterprise  was  described  by  The  Fatherland  as  a  great  move 
ment  "to  organize  the  German- American  element  and  all 
German  and  Austro-Hungarian  sympathizers."  In  Con 
gress  the  friends  of  the  embargo  movement  urged  their 
resolutions,  while  citizens  outside  flooded  members  with 
form  letters  and  telegrams  demanding  that  they  support 
such  action.  In  June,  1915,  the  Friends  of  Peace  induced 
Bryan,  who  had  now  left  the  Cabinet,  to  denounce  prepared 
ness,  and  at  the  same  time  Labor's  National  Peace  Council 
was  floated  upon  funds  that  were  later  shown  to  have  origi 
nated  in  the  German  Government. 

The  secret  intrigues  by  which  Germany  and  Austria  sought 
to  prevent  the  development  of  an  adverse  Amer-    German 
ican  opinion  were  increased  after  the  sinking  of    secret 
the  Lusitania  had   shown    how  precarious  the 
situation  was.    The  New  York  Evening  Mail  was  secretly 


448     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

bought  and  converted  into  an  anti-British  organ.  Societies 
like  the  American  Humanity  League  and  the  American 
Embargo  Conference  were  created  or  subsidized  for  the 
same  purpose.  Agents  attached  to  the  German  and  Aus 
trian  embassies  were  used  for  the  definite  purpose  of  fo 
menting  strikes  in  manufacturing  plants  engaged  in  pro 
ducing  munitions  for  the  Allies  and  in  injuring  their  output 
by  means  of  sabotage.  Enough  evidence  as  to  the  intrigue 
was  known  to  the  White  House  to  give  an  ominous  char 
acter  to  the  Lusitania  correspondence,  and  to  induce  von 
Bernstorff,  the  German  Ambassador,  to  redouble  his  efforts 
to  prevent  a  breach.  In  August  an  American  journalist  was 
arrested  by  the  British  at  Falmouth  while  on  his  way  to 
the  Continent  and  was  found  to  have  in  his  dispatch  cases 
correspondence  of  Dr.  Constantin  Dumba,  the  Austrian 
Ambassador  in  Washington,  recommending  a  deliberate 
program  of  industrial  intrigue.  The  facts  of  these  viola 
tions  of  neutral  duties  by  American  citizens  were  trans 
mitted  by  the  English  Government  to  Robert  Lansing, 
who  had  succeeded  Bryan  as  Secretary  of  State,  with  the 
result  that  the  recall  of  Dumba  was  demanded  in  Septem 
ber.  Two  months  later  the  military  and  naval  attaches 
to  the  German  Embassy,  von  Papen  and  Boy-Ed,  were 
dismissed  because  of  their  proved  complicity  in  unneutral 
plots  engineered  by  Buenz,  American  agent  of  the  Ham 
burg-American  Line.  At  the  end  of  the  year  it  became 
possible  to  substantiate  the  plots  with  greater  definiteness, 
for  the  British  found  in  von  Papen's  papers  at  Falmouth 
check-books  whose  incriminating  stubs  revealed  part  of 
the  details  of  the  pro-German  plot. 

The  office  of  von  Papen  in  New  York  was  occupied  after 
his  departure  by  Wolf  von  Igel,  who  continued  the  intrigue. 
On  April  18,  1916,  the  rooms-were  raided  by  officers  of  the 
Department  of  Justice,  and  the  records  in  von  Igel's  safe 
were  seized.  The  German  Ambassador  protested  that  this 
was  a  violation  of  diplomatic  immunity,  but  Secretary 
Lansing  showed  that  neither  the  premises  nor  their  occupant 
were  on  the  diplomatic  list,  and  offered  to  turn  over  to  the 


THE  ELECTION  OF  1916  449 

German  Ambassador  any  documents  which  he  would  au 
thenticate  as  his  own.  Von  Bernstorff  made  no  claim  to 
any  of  them,  for  the  secret  papers  here  seized  provided  the 
data  for  federal  prosecutions  which  subsequently  exposed  in 
fuller  detail  the  secret  activities  of  the  German  Embassy. 
The  crisis  produced  by  the  Lusitania  was  not  followed 
by  any  occurrence  of  similar  magnitude  until  the  Channel 
steamer  Sussex  was_sunkjby  a  submarine  on  Sussex  ul- 
March  2_ii_jsath  a  loss  of  two  American  timatum 


lives.  There  was  one  course  possible  for  the 
United  States  after  the  warning  conveyed  in  the  third 
Lusitania  note.  On  April  18  the  President  transmitted  an 
ultimatum  to  Germany  which  he  explained  to  Congress  the 
following  day.  "Unless  the  Imperial  German  Government 
should  now  immediately  effect  and  declare  an  abandon 
ment  of  its  present  methods  of  warfare  against  passenger 
and  freight-carrying  vessels,  this  Government  can  have  no 
choice  but  to  sever  diplomatic  relations  with  the  Govern 
ment  of  the  German  Empire  altogether."  A  specific  pledge 
given  by  Germany  to  amend  its  practice  postponed  the 
diplomatic  breach,  but  in  Congress  and  the  departments 
the  program  of  national  defense  was  pushed  ahead  against 
the  organized  obstruction  of  pacifists  and  German  sym 
pathizers. 

The  National  Defense  Act  of  June,  1916,  was  the  first 
great  step  in  the  accomplishment  of  the  pre-  Nationai 
paredness  program.  In  the  earlier  stages  of  its  Defense  Act, 
discussion  the  line  was  sharply  drawn  between 
those  who  desired  an  army  organized  on  the  basis  of  com 
pulsory  service  and  those  who  desired  to  maintain  it  upon 
the  National  Guard  and  the  principle  of  volunteering.  The 
recommendation  of  the  General  Staff  was  for  compulsory 
service,  which  was  supported  by  Senator  Chamberlain  and 
many  of  the  preparedness  advocates.  The  Secretary  of 
War,  Garrison,  supported  the  principle  of  a  continental 
army  that  should  be  subject  to  federal  control  and  not 
hampered  by  the  ineffectiveness  inherent  in  the  National 
Guard  system.  Unable  to  induce  Wilson  to  take  an  unal- 


450    RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

terable  stand  for  his  principle  of  army  organization,  Garri 
son  resigned  in  February,  1916,  and  was  shortly  succeeded 
by  Newton  D.  Baker,  of  Cleveland.  The  bill  was  finally 
passed,  providing  an  authorized  strength  for  the  regular 
army  of  223,000;  the  total  to  be  reached  in  five  years.  It 
provided  also  for  a  National  Guard  of  about  450,000  of 
ficers  and  men.  The  Guard  itself  was  now  on  serviceTon  the 
Mexican  border  supplementing  the  efforts  of  the  regular 
army  to  put  a  stop  to  the  marauding  work  of  Villa.  The 
law  also  provided  for  the  development  of  an  qfficers^reserve 
corps  to  be  recruited  from  civil  life  and  trained  in  summer 
camps  such  as  had  been  begun  by  General  Leonard  Wood 
while  chief  of  staff  and  continued  with  great  success  at 
Plattsburg  and  elsewhere  in  1915.  A  revision  of  the  articles 
of  war,  finished  later  in  the  summer,  was  attached  to  the 
Army  Appropriation  Bill  in  August. 

The  Nevada,  the  Oklahoma,  and  the  Pennsylvania,  new 
Naval  dreadnaughts  carrying  fourteen-inch  guns,  were 

program  brought  into  service  in  the  spring  of  1916,  while 
Congress  debated  the  lessons  of  the  European  War  and 
the  form  that  naval  defense  should  take.  Among  the  naval 
theorists  there  was  controversy  as  to  the  effects  of  subma 
rine  warfare  upon  battleship  programs  and  upon  the  rela 
tive  merits  of  dreadnaughts  and  the  swifter  fighting  units 
known  as  battle  cruisers.  Since  the  Spanish  War  the  naval 
building  policy  had  included  the  construction  of  one  or  two 
capital  ships  every  year,  but  there  had  been  no  acceptance 
of  a  general  program  or  an  approved  naval  strength  to  be 
reached  at  a  given  date.  A  proposal  for  a  five-year  pro 
gram,  prepared  in  the  autumn  of  1915,  was  condensed  into 
three  years  in  the  course  of  the  debate  upon  preparedness. 
The  Naval  Appropriation  Act  of  1916  carried  a  larger  sum 
than  had  ever  before  been  voted  at  one  time  for  national 
defense,  and  authorized  the  building  over  a  term  of  three 
years^of  ten  dreadnaughts  and  six  battle  cruisers. 

Another  type  of  defense  was  provided  for  in  August,  1916, 
when  Congress  authorized  the  creation  of  a  Council  of 
National  Defense  to  consist  of  six  members  of  the  Cabinet 


THE  ELECTION  OF  1916  451 

with  the  assistance  of  an  Advisory  Commission  of  seven, 
civilian  experts.  Such  a  body  as  this  had  been  Council  of 
urged  by  preparedness  advocates  for  many  years  National 
as  a  means  of  drafting  plans  of  defense  that  might 
make  easier  a  complete  national  mobilization  in  time  of 
war.  The  obvious  effect  of  the  World  War  in  tying  into  a 
compact  unit  the  whole  civil  and  military  population  of 
every  belligerent  country  showed  what  would  be  necessary 
should  the  United  States  become  involved  in  any  great 
struggle.  Secretary  Daniels  had  already  taken  a  step  in 
this  direction  by  organizing  a  Naval  Consulting  Board  in 
October,  1915,  to  give  scientific  advice  upon  the  manufac 
ture  of  naval  munitions.  This  body  appointed  a  committee 
on  industrial  preparedness  that  in  the  following  winter  made 
a  survey  of  the  facilities  of  existing  plants  for  carrying  on 
munitions  work.  The  National  Academy  of  Sciences  at  the 
request  of  the  President  had  also  been  turned  towrard  the 
problems  of  defense,  creating  for  this  purpose  a  National 
Research  Council.  In  September,  at  the  close  of  the  pre 
paredness  session,  Congress  created  the  United  States 
Shipping  Board,  urged  by  the  President  two  years  pre 
viously,  and  a  Tariff  Commission  made  necessary  by  the 
intricate  effects  of  the  World  War  on  foreign  trade.  Con 
gress  adjourned  on  September  8  with  the  presidential  can 
vass  of  1916  already  well  advanced. 

In  the  four  years  since  1912  Progressives  and  conserva 
tive  Republicans  had  remained  as  far  apart  as  ever,  but 
successful  efforts  had  been  made  to  bring  them    R0oseveit 
back  into  a  common  party  that  might  have  a    and  the 
chance  to  elect  a  President.     The  national  or 
ganization  of  the  Progressive  Party  continued  to  go  through 
the  motions  as  though  it  were  a  reality,  but  called  its  na 
tional  convention  to  meet  at  Chicago  on  the  same  day  as 
the  Republican  Convention,  June  7,  1916.     The  leadership 
of  Colonel  Roosevelt  over  his  Progressive  followers  had 
not  weakened  in  the  four  years.      The  Progressives  who 
objected  to  him  and  distrusted  him  continued  to  object, 
but  his  friends  remained  firm  in  their  allegiance  and  hoped 


452     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

to  win  the  Republican  nomination  for  him.  In  an  interview 
given  out  from  the  Island  of  Trinidad  in  March,  Theodore 
Roosevelt  declared  that  "June  is  a  long  way  off,"  and  was 
held  to  have  announced  his  candidacy  by  denying  his  in 
terest  in  "the  political  fortunes  either  of  myself  or  any 
other  man,"  and  by  asserting  his  interest  "in  awakening 
my  fellow-countrymen  to  the  need  of  facing  unpleasant 
facts." 

In  the  contest  for  delegates  there  was  no  revival  of  the 

bitterness    of    1912,    and    numerous    favorite    sons    were 

brought  out  representing  all  shades  of  Republi- 

Nomination  .    .  ™  .         .  ..      . 

of  Hughes  can  opinion.  Ihe  emergence  of  public  inter- 
Re  ^blicans  es^  *n  ^e  cnaracter  of  Justice  Charles  Evans 
Hughes  destroyed  the  chances  of  all  local  candi 
dates  and  left  the  contest  for  the  nomination  between  him 
and  Roosevelt.  The  judicial  attitude  of  mind  that  made 
him  a  great  lawyer  and  judge  made  Hughes  a  candidate 
acceptable  to  conservative  Republicans,  while  the  vigor 
with  which  he  had  pressed  his  reform  measures  as  governor 
of  New  York  gave  him  a  wide  following  among  the  Pro 
gressives.  During  the  canvass  for  delegates  he  remained 
at  his  work  in  the  Supreme  Court  without  uttering  a 
public  word  to  indicate  his  interest  in  the  contest.  At  the 
convention  he  received  the  support  of  still  other  elements 
in  the  party  who  were  as  anxious  to  defeat  President 
Wilson  as  any  Republicans,  and  who  objected  to  Colonel 
Roosevelt  because  of  the  vigor  with  which  he  had  criticized 
the  action  of  Germany  in  the  war. 

A  few  days  before  the  Republican  Convention  a  group  of 
German-American  newspaper  editors  held  a  conference  at 
Chicago  and  gave  out  a  public  statement  demanding  a 
candidate  for  President,  whom  they  described  as  with 
out  passionate  attachment  to  any  foreign  country.  "The 
nomination  of  Justice  Hughes  means  the  redemption  of 
the  Republican  Party,"  declared  The  Fatherland.  The  an 
tipathy  of  German-Americans  to  Roosevelt  coincided  with 
that  of  the  conservative  Republican  group.  The  Pro 
gressive  Convention  met  and  nominated  Roosevelt  in  the 


THE  ELECTION  OF  1916  453 

hope  that  the  Republicans  would  concur  and  avoid  a  split. 
The  Republicans,  however,  nominated  Hughes  and  Fair 
banks,  and  Justice  Hughes  immediately  resigned  his  seat 
on  the  Supreme  Court  to  enter  vigorously  upon  the  canvass. 

The  unpopularity  of  Colonel  Roosevelt  with  the  German 
vote  was  surpassed  only  by  that  of  President  Wilson,  who 
was  renominated  by  the  Democratic  Conven-  Hyphenated 
tion  without  contest.  The  German  intrigue  to.  Amencans 
tie  the  hands  of  the  United  States  in  the  World  War  ran 
parallel  to  the  feelings  of  Americans  of  German  descent 
who  were  unable  to  believe  the  truth  of  the  charges  made 
against  Germany  by  her  enemies.  The  bitterness  with 
which  they  believed  that  Wilson's  policies  had  favored 
England  and  injured  Germany  was  aggravated  by  their 
resentment  at  the  charges  of  "hyphenism"  made  against 
them.  Some  weeks  before  the  outbreak  of  the  war,  while 
dedicating  a  monument  to  a  great  Irishman,  Barry,  wrho 
laid  the  foundations  of  the  American  navy  in  the  Revolution, 
Wilson  had  defined  the  hyphen.  "Some  Americans,"  he 
said,  "need  hyphens  in  their  names  because  only  part  of 
them  came  over,  but  when  the  whole  man  has  come 
over,  heart  and  thought  and  all,  the  hyphen  drops  of  its 
own  weight  out  of  his  name."  In  his  succeeding  speeches 
upon  the  issues  of  the  war  he  denounced  without  restraint 
the  hyphenated  Americans  who  acted  in  American  affairs 
not  as  Americans,  but  as  naturalized  Europeans. 

The  hope  of  the  Progressive  Party  that  its  nomination  of 
Roosevelt  would  force  the  Republicans  to  accept  him  failed 
doubly.  The  old  party  nominated  Hughes;  and  Roose 
velt  declined  to  run  independently,  after  it  was  too  late  to 
choose  a  substitute.  His  desire  to  defeat  the  Democratic 
ticket  made  him  unwilling  to  assist  it  by  dividing  the 
Republican  vote.  In  the  ensuing  canvass  he  gave  his 
support  to  Hughes,  without  quite  believing  that  the  latter 
deserved  to  win. 

The  task  of  the  Republican  candidate  was  to  play  both 
ends  against  the  middle.  In  his  speeches  Hughes  felt 
bound  to  satisfy  the  Progressives  without  alienating  the 


454     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

conservatives,  and  to  hold  the  interest  of  extreme  pro- 
Allies  without  forfeiting  that  of  Germans  who  desired  to 
punish  Wilson.  It  weakened  his  chances  when  it  was 
learned  that  he  had  given  audience  to  Jeremiah  A.  O'Leary, 
a  leader  in  the  movement  to  punish  Wilson ;  and  it  helped 
Wilson  when  the  President's  reply  to  the  overtures  of  the 
same  leader  was  made  public:  "  I  should  feel  deeply  morti 
fied  to  have  you  or  anybody  like  you  vote  for  me.  Since 
you  have  access  to  many  disloyal  Americans  and  I  have 
not,  I  will  ask  you  to  convey  this  message  to  them."  It 
injured  Hughes  also  when  in  California  on  the  stump  he 
accepted  a  banquet  served  by  "scab"  waiters  and  left  the 
State  without  even  meeting  its  progressive  and  popular 
governor,  Hiram  Johnson. 

The  difficult  task  of  President  Wilson  was  to  hold  to 
gether  the  vote  of  1914,  and  to  defeat  the  united  Republi- 
Wilson  and  can  Pai"ty>  which  no  Democrat  had  done  since 
the  Adam-  the  Civil  War.  He  stood  on  the  record  of 
Democratic  achievement  and  of  fundamental 
loyalty  to  America.  His  followers  in  the  West  and  South, 
sensing  the  drift  of  the  pro-German  or  pro-Ally  endeavors, 
translated  this  latter  issue  into  the  phrase,  "He  kept  us 
out  of  war";  and  the  women,  newly  enfranchised  in  the 
Western  States,  appear  to  have  voted  on  this  phrase.  In 
August  a  national  calamity  in  the  form  of  a  strike  of  the 
four  railway  brotherhoods  appeared  on  the  horizon,  and 
such  a  strike  was  called  for  Labor  Day.  After  a  conference 
with  the  railroad  managers  and  leaders  of  the  unions, 
Wilson  exerted  his  influence  over  Congress  and  induced  it 
to  avert  the  strike  by  making  the  principle  of  the  basic 
eight-hour  day  mandatory  upon  interstate  railroads.  The 
strike  was  avoided,  but  the  Adamson  Law  by  which  Con 
gress  fixed  the  wages  of  the  trainmen  became  a  new  issue 
in  the  canvass. 

The  first  returns  from  the  election  in  November,  1916, 
Reflection  indicated  that  Hughes  was  the  choice,  but  later 
of  Wilson  returns  conveyed  the  unusual  fact  that  although 
he  carried  every  New  England  State  except  New  Hamp- 


THE  ELECTION  OF  1916  455 

shire,  all  of  the  Northwest  but  Ohio,  and  every  Middle 
State  but  Maryland,  he  was  defeated  by  the  accumulated 
votes  of  the  farther  West  and  South.  Hughes  was  defeated 
by  political  mismanagement  in  one  or  two  doubtful  States, 
but  the  reelection  of  Wilson  by  whatever  means,  in  oppo 
sition  to  the  densely  populated  States  of  the  North  and 
East,  marked  a  revolution  in  political  influence  paralleled 
only  by  the  victories  of  Jefferson,  Jackson,  and  Lincoln. 

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL  NOTE 

Jones  and  Hollister,  The  German  Secret  Service  in  America  (1918),  and 
Count  Bernstorff,  My  Three  Years  in  America  (1920),  give  different  ac 
counts  of  the  attempts  to  influence  American  thought.  The  Fatherland 
(1910-)  gloried  in  its  German  sympathies,  and  made  no  concealment  of  its 
desire  to  control  politics  with  a  German  vote.  The  World's  Work  and  the 
Providence  (R.I.)  Journal  contain  many  articles  intended  to  nullify  Ger 
man  influence,  while  the  New  York  Times  Current  History  (1914-)  is  an 
invaluable  assemblage  of  documents  relating  to  the  war.  Of  somewhat 
direct  bearing  upon  the  election  are  W.  L.  Ransom,  Charles  E.  Hughes,  the 
Statesman  as  Shown  in  the  Opinions  of  the  Jurist  (1916) ;  Jacob  G.  Schurman, 
Addresses  of  Charles  Evans  Hughes,  1906-1916  (1916);  William  Howard 
Taft,  Our  Chief  Magistrate  and  his  Powers  (1916) ;  and  Speeches  of  William 
Jennings  Bryan,  Revised  and  Arranged  by  Himself  (1911).  There  is  no 
compilation  to  take  the  place  of  Stanwood's  History  of  the  Presidency,  whose 
second  volume  ends  with  the  platforms  of  1912.  F.  L.  Huidekoper,  The 
Military  Unpreparedness  of  the  United  States  (1915),  is  useful  upon  military 
topics,  as  is  the  Army  and  Navy  Journal. 


CHAPTER  XLVI 
LABOR 

THE  Adamson  Law  was  enacted  on  September  3,  1916, 
under  Administration  pressure  backed  by  the  threat  of  a 
railroad  strike.  The  four  railway  brotherhoods  involved  in 
the  struggle  were  among  the  best  organized  and  most  re 
sponsible  trade  unions  in  the  United  States.  For  many 
years  it  had  been  their  boast  that  they  procured  their 
results  by  collective  bargaining.  They  defended  their 
threat  to  tie  up  the  transportation  of  the  country  by  the 
assertion  that  the  railroads  were  now  so  unified  in  their 
policies  through  interlocking  directorates  and  gentlemen's 
agreements  that  they  could  maintain  a  common  plan  in  the 
face  of  demands  from  their  employees. 

Wage  increases  were  demanded  by  the  brotherhoods  to 
meet  the  rising  cost  of  living.  For  nearly  twenty  years  the 
Wages  and  index  curve  of  average  retail  prices  had  been 
cost  of  gradually  rising,  and  since  the  outbreak  of  the 

war  in  Europe  the  increase  in  many  directions 
had  been  spectacular.  All  labor  in  America  was  unsettled 
because  of  the  demand  for  workmen  and  the  cost  of  living. 
The  double  effect  of  the  World  War  was  to  stop  the  an 
nual  supply  of  cheap  labor  from  Europe  that  had  averaged 
over  a  million  a  year  for  ten  years  before  the  war,  and  to 
increase  the  demand  for  American  goods  for  Allied  con 
sumption.  The  enlargement  of  munitions  plants  was  only 
one  aspect  of  the  growing  demand  for  labor.  The  effects 
produced  by  European  causes  were  intensified  by  do 
mestic  developments,  such  as  the  increase  in  the  number  of 
motor  cars  in  use,  that  produced  new  objects  for  expendi 
ture  and  called  for  help  to  supply  new  needs. 

With  new  opportunities  competing  for  their  services  and 
with  the  supply  of  labor  no  longer  increasing,  it  became 
possible  for  organized  labor  to  gain  victories  of  a  sort  un- 


LABOR  457 

usual  in  preceding  years.  The  Adamson  Law  was  de 
nounced  by  Judge  Hughes  at  Nashville  the  day  The  Adam- 
after  its  passage.  He  pointed  out  that  the  meas-  son  Law 
ure  was  enacted  under  pressure  rather  than  upon  its  merits 
and  charged  that  it  was  a  party  move  to  win  the  vote  of 
organized  labor.  The  act  as  it  passed  Congress  was  less 
than  the  program  for  which  the  President  had  asked.  He 
insisted  upon  the  recognition  of  the  eight-hour  day,  but 
also  asked  for  powers  that  would  make  the  repetition  of 
such  a  situation  improbable,  by  requiring  and  giving  time 
for  a  public  investigation  of  the  controversy  at  issue  before 
permitting  such  a  strike  to  be  precipitated.  The  demand 
of  the  employees  for  an  eight-hour  day  was  declared  to  be 
a  demand  for  wage  increase  in  disguise,  the  real  intent  being 
not  to  limit  the  working  day,  but  to  secure  time  and  a  half 
for  overtime  over  eight  hours.  The  unions  declared  that 
in  the  absence  of  such  a  law  their  members  were  frequently 
forced  to  work  sixteen  hours  or  more  at  a  stretch,  to  their 
injury  and  to  the  danger  of  the  traveling  public. 

The  law  provided  that  the  new  working  day  should  be 
come  effective  January  I,  1917.  Before  that  date  the  rail 
roads  attacked  the  law  in  the  courts  and  procured  a  district 
court  decision  that  it  was  unconstitutional.  They  let  it  be 
known  that  pending  a  final  decision  by  the  Supreme  Court 
they  would  not  pay  the  overtime  provided  by  the  Adamson 
Law,  but  would  hold  it  in  a  separate  fund  for  the  benefit  of 
the  employees.  A  new  strike  to  force  the  railroads  to  obey 
the  law  at  once  was  declared  in  March,  1917,  but  was  post 
poned  at  the  request  of  the  President  while  a  special  com 
mission  consisting  of  Secretaries  Lane  and  Wilson,  and 
Daniel  Willard,  chairman  of  the  Advisory  Commission  of 
the  Council  of  National  Defense,  brought  pressure  upon 
the  railroad  companies.  These  yielded  on  March  19,  and 
later  in  the  day  the  Supreme  Court  by  a  vote  of  five  to  four 
upheld  the  constitutionality  of  the  act,  and  asserted  in  a 
dictum  that  it  would  have  been  possible  for  Congress  to 
compel  the  unions  to  arbitrate  their  grievance.  Among 
the  five  justices  making  the  majority  in  this  decision  were 


458     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

two  new  members  recently  appointed,  Louis  D.  Brandeis, 
a  liberal  lawyer  prominent  for  his  advocacy  of  labor  causes 
and  his  leadership  against  the  trusts,  and  John  H.  Clarke, 
an  Ohio  associate  of  Secretary  Baker. 

Samuel  Gompers,  president  of  the  American  Federation 
of  Labor,  denounced  that  part  of  the  Supreme  Court  de- 
Gompers  cision  that  alleged  a  power  to  compel  the  unions 
and  the  to  arbitrate.  He  maintained  the  right  to  strike 

American  ...  .  .  . 

Federation  as  inherent  in  citizenship,  and  his  organization 
supported  the  demands  of  the  railway  brother 
hoods  through  the  controversy  just  terminated.  These 
brotherhoods  were  the  only  important  organizations  of 
labor  not  included  in  the  American  Federation,  but  there 
was  cooperation  between  their  several  leaders,  and  the 
heads  of  the  brotherhoods  addressed  the  annual  convention 
of  the  Federation  in  1916,  in  an  attempt  to  bring  all  organ 
ized  labor  into  a  fight  against  anti-strike  injunctions  and 
compulsory  arbitration.  Gompers,  now  sixty-seven  years 
of  age,  and  head  of  the  Federation,  with  the  exception  of 
a  single  year,  since  1882,  represented  in  1916  an  aggregate 
of  2,072,802  organized  workmen.  In  the  American  Feder- 
ationist,  through  which  Gompers  reached  his  followers,  he 
consistently  upheld  the  labor  movement  and  repelled  both 
the  idea  of  Government  control  and  the  undermining  at 
tempts  of  labor  radicals  imbued  with  the  revolutionary 
ideas  of  syndicalism.  He  kept  labor  out  of  politics  in  the 
sense  that  he  espoused  no  political  party  and  opposed  the 
formation  of  a  labor  party,  but  he  believed  in  throwing  the 
vote  of  wage-earners  where  it  would  injure  public  officials 
who  opposed  the  demands  of  organized  labor,  and  reward 
its  friends. 

The  aim  of  the  Socialist  Party,  directly  opposed  to  that 
ol  Gompers  and  the  American  Federation  of  Labor,  was 
Socialist  obtainable  only  with  the  support  of  the  group 
Party  that  Gompers  led.  There  was  a  rising  So 

cialist  vote  after  1900,  with  here  and  there  a  Socialist  lo 
cally  elected  to  office  or  to  Congress.  In  the  presidential 
elections  Debs  received  87,814  votes  in  1900,  402,283  in 


LABOR  459 

1904,  420,793  in  1908,  901,873  in  1912,  and  Allan  Benson, 
editor  of  the  American  Socialist,  590,570  in  1916.  The 
platforms  of  the  Socialist  Party  reflected  the  doctrines  of 
Karl  Marx,  and  the  ideal  of  a  social  revolution.  Many  of 
the  most  active  party  leaders  were  naturalized  citizens  who 
had  grown  to  maturity  of  conviction  in  their  native  homes 
in  Russia,  Austria,  and  Germany.  Many  of  their  followers 
were  foreign-born. 

More  radical  than  the  organized  Socialists  and  more 
dangerous  to  the  settled  program  of  the  American  Feder 
ation  were  the  aims  of  a  small  group  of  labor  Syndicalism 
leaders  who  opposed  the  idea  of  collective  bar-  and  saboiaze 
gaining  and  worked  for  a  social  revolution  by  direct  action. 
The  word  "syndicalism,"  as  descriptive  of  the  ideals  of  this 
group,  came  into  the  American  vocabulary  in  1912,  in  the 
course  of  a  great  strike  of  unskilled  workmen  at  Lawrence, 
Massachusetts.  The  problem  of  unskilled  labor  was  in 
substance  the  problem  of  the  unassimilated  immigrant. 
In  the  past  century  the  basis  of  boss  rule  and  corrupt  city 
government  was  laid  on  the  political  control  of  the  votes  of 
this  class,  and  among  these  the  extreme  social  leaders  were 
now  preaching  their  doctrine.  Syndicalism  was  founded 
on  the  assumption  that  the  workmen  are  entitled  to  the 
whole  product  that  they  create,  and  that  the  quickest  way 
for  them  to  gain  possession  of  the  tools  of  the  trade  and  the 
control  of  industrial  life  is  by  direct  action  to  make  the 
position  of  capital  untenable.  It  regarded  collective  bar 
gaining  as  injurious  because  this  made  it  possible  for  cap 
ital  to  exist,  and  taught  that  agreements  ought  to  be  vio 
lated  whenever  convenient.  The  word  sabotage  came  into 
the  vocabulary  with  syndicalism,  describing  the  process  of 
breaking  the  machinery,  spoiling  the  output,  and  otherwise 
injuring  the  employer.  In  the  strike  it  was  necessary  for 
the  workmen  to  leave  their  job  and  forfeit  their  pay.  By 
sabotage  they  could  do  just  as  much  harm  to  their  employer 
and  continue  to  draw  their  wages. 

The  Lawrence  strike  was  accompanied  by  local  violence 
and  wide  publicity.  The  local  violence  produced  another 


46o     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

occasion  for  the  use  of  the  militia  and  for  demonstration 
of  its  inadequacy.  Since  the  railroad  strikes  of  1877  the 
National  Guard  of  various  States  was  habitually  called  into 
active  service  to  attempt  to  procure  order  when  the  local 
machinery  of  the  police  broke  down,  and  an  antipathy  of 
organized  labor  toward  the  National  Guard  was  a  conse 
quence  of  this.  Labor  came  to  believe  that  the  militia  was 
only  an  agency  of  capitalism.  During  the  Colorado  mining 
strike  of  1903  this  belief  was  intensified.  There  was  no 
money  in  the  Colorado  Treasury  to  pay  the  expenses  of  the 
militia  in  the  field,  yet  the  local  authorities  were  powerless 
to  maintain  order,  and  sympathizers  of  the  Western  Fed 
eration  of  Miners  inaugurated  a  reign  of  terror.  In  this 
crisis  the  mine-owners  with  large  property  interests  at 
stake  guaranteed  the  expenses  of  the  campaign  if  the  gov 
ernor  would  call  out  the  militia.  This  was  done,  and  it 
became  possible  for  radical  labor  leaders  to  charge  with  a 
semblance  of  truth  that  the  militia  was  hired  out  to  break 
the  strike. 

The  ineffectiveness  of  the  militia  was  due  to  its  volun 
tary  character  and  lack  of  discipline.  In  1905  Pennsylvania 
State  con-  tried  the  experiment  of  creating  a  State  constab- 
stabularies  ulary  to  reenforce  the  hands  of  local  police  au 
thorities  and  to  render  it  unnecessary  to  use  the  militia 
to  curb  disorder  arising  from  labor  controversies.  The 
Pennsylvania  constabulary  was  organized  along  the  lines 
made  famous  by  the  Royal  Mounted  Police  of  the  Canadian 
Northwest.  Its  success  was  complete  and  immediate,  and 
the  example  was  followed  by  New  York  and  other  States, 
but  the  unpopularity  of  the  constabulary  with  organized 
labor  exceeded  that  of  the  militia. 

About  the  time  that  the  Pennsylvania  constabulary  was 
established  the  extreme  revolutionary  labor  leaders  or- 
Industrial  ganized  the  Industrial  Workers  of  the  World 
Workers  of  in  protest  against  the  policies  of  the  American 
Federation  and  in  favor  of  social  revolution  by 
direct  action.  The  leaders  of  the  I. WAV.  and  many  of  the 
members  came  from  the  Western  Federation  of  Miners 


LABOR  461 

whose  career  had  received  wide  notoriety  in  the  Rocky 
Mountain  States,  and  whose  strikes  had  been  accompanied 
by  violence  at  Cceur  d'Alene  in  Idaho  and  Cripple  Creek 
in  Colorado.  Moyer  and  Haywood,  the  leaders,  were  So 
cialists  as  well  as  labor  agitators,  and  aimed  to  divert  the 
American  labor  movement  into  a  revolutionary  socialistic 
organization.  They  found  their  most  promising  material 
in  the  ranks  of  unskilled  labor,  which  constituted  the  most 
notable  defect  of  the  scheme  of  the  American  Federation. 
The  organized  trades,  working  as  industrial  groups,  made 
up  the  Federation,  which  thus  included  the  aristocracy  of 
labor.  There  was  no  considerable  success  in  the  organ 
ization  of  the  unskilled  whose  illiteracy  and  miscellaneous 
nativity  made  them  hard  to  approach,  and  whose  migratory 
habits  made  them  unreliable  for  organization  purposes. 
The  I.W.W.  appealed  to  this  group  with  its  idea  of  one  big 
union  that  could  by  direct  action  plot  against  activities  of 
any  industry  or  by  general  strike  tie  up  society  itself. 

Public  opinion  was  impressed  with  the  incidental  violence 
that  appeared  wherever  the  I.W.W.  was  active  in  the  seven 
years  of  its  life  before  it  organized  the  foreign  laborers  at 
Lawrence  and  brought  on  the  strike  of  1912.  Moyer  and 
Haywood  gained  the  appellation  of  "undesirable  citizens" 
from  Colonel  Roosevelt  at  the  time  they  were  under  indict 
ment  for  the  murder  of  ex-Governor  Stuenenberg,  which 
occurred  in  1905.  This  murder,  apparently  gratuitous  and 
growing  out  of  Western  Federation  controversies,  occasioned 
a  famous  trial  at  Boise,  Idaho,  in  1907,  in  which  William 
E.  Borah  first  gained  national  attention  as  counsel  for  the 
prosecution.  The  jury  failed  to  convict,  but  the  testimony 
revealed  the  long  career  of  violence  associated  with  the 
Western  Federation  of  Miners,  and  when  Haywood  became 
an  active  leader  of  the  I.W.W.  his  reputation  helped  to 
establish  that  of  the  new  organization. 

The  cause  of  organized  labor  was  further  injured  by  the 
activities  of  structural  steel  workers  in  California  which 
culminated  in  an  attempt  to  wreck  by  a  bomb  the  plant 
of  the  Los  Angeles  Times,  and  the  arrest  of  the  two  brothers 


462     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

McNamara  as  responsible  for  it.     The  McNamara  trial  at 
Los  Angeles  in  1911  was  made  the  occasion  for 

The  Me-  -111  i 

Namara  and    a  great  protest  by  organized  labor  that  these 


nien  were  being  railroaded  to  jail  by  a  conspir 
acy  of  capital.  Unions  subscribed  to  the  de 
fense  funds  and  the  American  Federation  of  Labor  took  up 
the  cause  of  the  accused.  When  these  confessed  on  Decem 
ber  I,  1911,  that  they  had  committed  the  crime  and  changed 
their  plea  to  guilty,  they  left  their  supporters  feeling  be 
trayed,  and  weakened  the  appeal  of  labor  the  next  time 
it  should  voice  a  protest.  A  year  later  a  group  of  thirty- 
eight  labor  chiefs  were  convicted  as  accomplices  in  the 
McNamara  conspiracy. 

In  July,  1916,  there  occurred  another  act  of  violence  to 
render  more  difficult  the  task  of  reconciling  the  aims  of 
capital  and  labor  and  of  establishing  the  proper  relation  of 
Government  to  each  of  them.  A  parade  at  San  Francisco, 
organized  as  a  demonstration  in  favor  of  national  prepared 
ness,  was  interrupted  by  the  explosion  of  a  bomb  that  killed 
several  persons.  California  had  been  the  scene  of  the 
bitterest  part  of  the  struggle  against  the  radicals.  The 
breach  between  labor  and  capital  was  here  as  wide  as  any 
where  in  the  country.  In  San  Francisco  a  few  weeks  later 
the  Republican  candidate  for  the  presidency  became  so 
involved  in  the  controversy  as  probably  to  account  for  his 
defeat  in  November. 

The  form  of  demonstration  for  preparedness  so  brutally 
interrupted  at  San  Francisco  was  prevalent  throughout  the 
United  States  in  1916.  The  public  tour  of  President  Wilson 
in  the  early  weeks  of  the  year  brought  the  matter  clearly  to 
public  attention,  and  on  June  14,  while  the  Democratic 
Convention  that  was  to  renominate  him  was  assembling  in 
St.  Louis,  he  marched  the  length  of  Pennsylvania  Avenue 
at  the  head  of  a  preparedness  procession,  and  delivered  a 
vigorous  speech  against  the  hyphen  in  American  politics. 
The  Socialist  labor  leaders  decried  these  preparations,  and 
organized  labor  in  some  cases  declined  to  march  in  simi 
lar  processions.  Preparedness  advocates  raised  a  clamor 


LABOR  463 

against  the  singing  of  a  popular  song,  "I  did  n't  raise  my 
boy  to  be  a  soldier."  They  were  denounced  in  turn  as 
profiteers.  "These  patriots  for  profit — the  richest  and 
most  powerful  group  of  men  in  the  United  States,"  declared 
a  Chicago  Congressman,  "have  their  minds  set  on  vastly 
increased  armaments,  and  they  want  no  interference."  To 
this  Senator  La  Follette  added,  "  If  a  man  dares  to  intimate 
that  he  is  unwilling  to  swallow  the  whole  program  for  pre 
paredness —  a  big  army,  a  big  navy,  big  contracts  for  muni 
tions  of  war —  that  man  is  a  fool  or.  a  coward  or  a  traitor." 

The  bomb  that  exploded  in  San  Francisco  on  June  22 
was  an  incident  in  the  preparedness  debate,  and  ultimately 
Thomas  Mooney,  a  labor  leader  whose  reputation  was 
already  violent  and  radical,  was  convicted  of  murder  and 
sentenced  to  be  hanged.  As  in  the  McNamara  case,  organ 
ized  labor  showed  a  tendency  to  demand  the  acquittal  of 
Mooney  and  to  assert  that  he  was  the  victim  of  a  conspir 
acy  by  the  enemies  of  labor.  Most  Americans  heard  his 
name  for  the  first  time  when  mobs  in  Petrograd  during 
the  revolution  of  March,  1917,  gathered  around  the  Amer 
ican  Embassy  to  demand  his  release.  The  international 
prominence  given  to  the  Mooney  case  by  Russian  revolu 
tionary  exiles  who  hurried  home  in  1917  forced  the  Na 
tional  Government  to  take  an  interest  in  his  fate.  His 
execution  was  stayed  and  the  sentence  was  subsequently 
commuted  to  life  imprisonment  by  the  governor  of  Cali 
fornia,  after  repeated  attempts  to  procure  his  retrial  or 
pardon  had  failed. 

The  growing  militancy  in  the  conduct  of  the  labor  move 
ment,  and  the  depressed  and  neglected  condition  of  un 
skilled  labor  which  made  it  a  safe  field  for  the    Americani- 
propagation    of   revolutionary   doctrines,    were    ^lon 
much  before  the  public  in  1916.     Congress  declined  to  meet 
the  former  situation  by  enacting  a  scheme  of  compulsory 
arbitration,  but  programs  of  Americanization  were  inau 
gurated  to  lessen  the  danger  of  un-American  propaganda. 
The  nativist  movement  that  had  frequently  appeared  in  the 
United  States  earlier  than  1916  now  for  the  first  time  took 


464    RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

the  form  of  hastening  the  process  of  assimilation  of  natu 
ralized  citizens.  Its  earlier  phases  had  confined  themselves 
largely  to  legal  and  political  attacks  against  the  foreign- 
born  as  in  the  Alien  and  Sedition  Acts  of  1798  and  the 
native  American  movement  of  the  fifties.  In  the  autumn 
of  1915  a  national  Americanization  committee  was  organ 
ized  to  bring  the  language  and  ideals  of  the  United  States 
into  the  lives  of  newcomers  of  whom  more  than  ten  mil 
lions  had  arrived  in  the  past  decade.  The  Americanization 
movement  took  the  form  of  political  education  and  instruc 
tion  in  the  English  language.  The  United  States  Bureau 
of  Education  took  an  active  part  in  advancing  it,  and  it 
speedily  entered  the  field  of  industry  as  employers  realized 
the  greater  efficiency  of  English-speaking  laborers,  and  as 
the. latter  became  aware  of  their  greater  earning  power. 

Militancy  as  a  means  of  advancing  reform  movements 
grew  more  frequent  after  its  adoption  by  the  advocates  of 
Woman  woman  suffrage  in  England  in  1906.  In  this 
suffrage  movement  it  proved  to  be  a  successful  means  of 
advertising  and  attracting  attention  where  earlier  and  more 
restrained  appeals  were  unavailing.  In  the  United  States 
the  suffrage  movement  did  not  become  militant  until  1917, 
when  a  faction  of  the  woman's  party  adopted  the  English 
methods  in  part.  During  the  Democratic  Convention  at 
St.  Louis  in  1916  advocates  of  woman  suffrage  in  costume 
and  in  silence  lined  the  streets  leading  to  the  auditorium. 
Leaders  of  both  parties  accepted  the  principle  of  woman 
suffrage  before  election  day.  In  1911  women  had  the  right 
to  vote  in  six  of  the  Western  States,  Wyoming,  Colorado, 
Utah,  Idaho,  Washington,  and  California,  and  had  par 
tial  suffrage  in  about  half  the  other  States.  The  American 
movement  took  the  double  form  of  working  for  State  suf 
frage  and  advocating  a  constitutional  amendment  for  the 
whole  United  States.  Additional  States  were  gained  one 
by  one  between  1911  and  1917,  while  the  Susan  B.  Anthony 
amendment  was  brought  forward  at  every  session  of  Con 
gress.  In  January,  1917,  the  Congressional  Union  for 
Woman  Suffrage  began  a  picketing  of  the  White  House  to 


LABOR  465 

influence  the  President  to  support  the  amendment  in  Con 
gress.  Two  years  later  Congress  yielded,  overriding  the  op 
position  of  the  Southern  States,  and  submitted  the  amend 
ment  for  ratification. 

Militancy,  radicalism,  and  reform  were  all  involved  in  a 
political  movement  that  appeared  in  the  Northwest.  The 
agrarian  region  west  of  the  Great  Lakes  and  Non-Parti- 
north  of  Texas,  in  which  the  Granger  and  Pop-  san  Leasue 
ulist  movements  arose  and  flourished,  produced  in  1915 
the  National  Non-Partisan  League,  which  showed  its  non- 
partisanship  by  seizing  the  primaries  of  the  Republican 
Party  and  electing  a  predetermined  farmers'  ticket  in  North 
Dakota.  The  grievances  behind  the  appearance  of  the 
Non-Partisan  League  were  economic,  due  to  crop  failures 
and  the  belief  that  the  railroads  and  elevator  companies 
were  running  the  State  for  their  own  advantage.  The  new 
league  was  held  together  through  the  organization  of  a 
paid-up  membership,  reached  by  the  N on-Partisan  Leader, 
first  published  at  Fargo,  North  Dakota,  in  September,  1915. 
The  League  employed  Socialist  writers  to  start  the  Leader, 
with  the  result  that  the  agitation  took  on  a  socialistic  aspect 
that  it  soon  abandoned.  The  organization  was  working 
for  the  extension  of  State  agencies  of  which  State  owned 
elevators,  State  hail  insurance,  and  State  banks  were  most 
discussed.  'The  members  of  the  non-partisan  league  are 
not  angry  at  anybody  ..."  asserted  the  Leader.  "The 
League  seeks  to  gather  together  all  the  forces  that  stand 
for  progress,  justice,  and  a  square  deal  for  the  people  of 
this  state."  The  Non-Partisan  League  elected  its  candi 
date  for  governor,  and  in  the  summer  of  1917  elected 
John  M.  Baer,  cartoonist  of  the  N  on-Partisan  Leader,  to 
Congress. 

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL  NOTE 

The  American  Yearbook,  and  the  New  International  Yearbook,  have 
increasing  value  for  the  more  recent  years.  John  R.  Commons,  Indus 
trial  Goodwill  (1919),  gives  a  sensible  summary  of  labor  problems.  The 
marginal  movements  in  the  field  of  industry  are  described  in  John  Graham 
Brooks,  American  Syndicalism  and  the  I.W.W.  (1913) ;  Paul  F.  Brissenden, 


466     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

The  I.W.W.',  a  Study  of  American  Syndicalism  (1919);  Herbert  Gaston, 
The  Nonpartisan  League  (1920);  and  Charles  Edward  Russell,  The  Story 
of  the  Nonpartisan  League  (1920).  Roger  W.  l^abson,  W.  B.  Wilson,  First 
Secretary  of  Labor  (1919),  is  a  laudatory  biography  by  a  competent  sta 
tistical  expert. 


CHAPTER  XLVI1 
THE  WAR  OF  1917 

THE  pledge  given  by  the  German  Government  after  the 
sinking  of  the  Sussex  was  kept  during  the  autumn  of  1916 
while  the  presidential  election  was  in  progress,  status  of 
The  United  States  continued  its  work  in  laying  the  war 
the  foundations  for  national  defense,  but  in  the  diplomatic 
field  no  new  developments  of  importance  occurred  until 
after  the  election.  Germany,  meanwhile,  believed  that  she 
had  won  the  war.  The  Allied  blockade  remained  unbroken, 
but  the  ambition  to  build  up  a  new  central  Europe  under 
German  leadership  was  accomplished.  Along  the  western 
front,  from  the  Swiss  border  north  toward  Verdun  and 
thence  westerly  to  the  English  Channel  the  opposing  lines 
of  trenches  had  not  been  widely  shifted  since  Joffre  com 
pelled  the  German  retreat  at  the  Marne  in  1914.  A  des 
perate  attempt  of  the  armies  under  the  Crown  Prince  to 
take  Verdun  in  1916  was  repulsed  by  France,  and  an  Allied 
attempt  to  break  through  the  trenches  along  the  Somme 
failed  in  the  latter  half  of  the  year. 

On  the  eastern  front  German  gains  were  decisive.  Dur 
ing  1915  Poland  and  Galicia  were  overrun,  and  Serbia  was 
completely  crushed,  making  it  possible  for  the  Central 
Powers  to  maintain  unimpeded  communications  with 
Constantinople.  Roumania  entered  the  war  in  1916  and 
was  occupied  by  the  Central  Powers  before  the  year  was  up. 
The  hopes  of  the  Pan-German  Party,  realized  in  Europe  by 
ihe  end  of  1916,  reached  out  across  Asia  Minor  toward 
Egypt  and  India,  and  the  old  catch-phrase  "Berlin  to  Bag 
dad"  was  changed  to  read  "  Antwerp  to  Bombay."  The 
French  historian,  Andre  Cheradame,  pointed  out  the  com 
pleteness  of  the  German  victory  in  the  East  in  his  "Pan- 
German  Plot  Exposed,"  and  warned  the  Allies  of  the  im 
minence  of  German  peace  overtures  inspired  by  a  German 
hope  to  consolidate  the  gains  of  war. 


468     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

On  December  12,  1916,  Germany,  acting  through  the 
United  States  Government,  offered  peace  to  the  Allies. 
German  ^ne  terms  °f  the  peace  were  not  announced  in 
peace  specific  form.  At  home  to  the  army  it  was 

overtures  1-11  r      •  i  i 

described  as  a  peace  of  victory,  but  to  the  out 
side  world  it  was  characterized  as  a  peace  "to  free  the 
world.''  In  every  Allied  country  there  were  factions  tired 
of  war  and  fearful  of  national  destruction  if  the  exhaustion 
should  continue.  The  American  Government  had  come 
to  the  conclusion  that  the  position  of  the  neutral  was  no 
longer  tenable.  With  war  as  it  now  existed,  involving  the 
whole  strength  of  each  belligerent,  and  leading  each  to  in 
sist  upon  a  belligerent  right  to  monopolize  the  common 
property  of  the  world,  the  neutral,  whose  existence  de 
pended  upon  the  free  enjoyment  of  its  rights  upon  the 
high  seas  on  legitimate  business,  found  itself  drawn  ever 
nearer  to  the  state  of  war. 

Six  days  after  the  German  peace  overtures  were  made, 
Secretary  Lansing  sent  notes  to  all  of  the  belligerents,  asking 
American  that  " an  eai"ly  occasion  be  sought  to  call  out 
peace  terms  from  all  nations  now  at  war  such  an  avowal  of 

inquiry  ,  .  . 

their  respective  views  as  to  terms  upon  which 
the  war  might  be  concluded  ...  as  would  make  it  possible 
frankly  to  compare  them."  The  note  went  on  to  point 
out  that  the  official  spokesmen  of  all  the  belligerents  were 
claiming  to  have  the  same  general  objects  in  mind;  "each 
side  desires  to  make  the  rights  and  privileges  of  weak  peo 
ples  and  small  states  .  .  .  secure  against  aggression.  .  .  . 
Each  wishes  itself  to  be  made  secure  in  the  future.  .  .  . 
Never  yet  have  the  authoritative  statesmen  of  either  side 
avowed  the  precise  objects  which  would  if  attained  satisfy 
them  and  their  people  that  the  war  had  been  fought  out." 
The  "war  of  peace  notes,"  as  the  London  Nation  de 
scribed  it,  was  continued  into  the  next  year.  The  German 
Government  ostensibly  welcomed  the  American  overtures, 
but  instead  of  reciting  precise  terms  demanded  a  general 
conference  to  work  them  out.  Simultaneously,  on  January 
I9»  I9I7»  it  instructed  its  Minister  in  Mexico  that  in  the 


THE  WAR  OF  1917  469 

event  of  a  war  with  the  United  States  he  was  to  arrange 

for  the  occupation  by  Mexico  of  the  territory  lost  in  1848  in 

the  region  of  New  Mexico,  Texas,  and  Arizona,  and  to  in- 

luce  Mexico  to  invite  the  adherence  of  Japan  to  this  end. 

The  Allied  Powers  rejected  the  German  overtures  at  once, 
nd  replied  to  the  American  request  with  a  specific  recital 
of  the  unprovoked  attack  by  Germany  upon  the  peace  of 
Europe,  the  violations  of  the  laws  of  war,  and  the  inhumane 
war  practices  of  the  aggressor,  and  stated  terms  of  peace 
based  upon  a  determination  to  prevent  a  repetition  of  the 
outrage.  On  January  22  President  Wilson  addressed  Con 
gress  upon  the  terms  of  peace,  and  interpreted  the  answers 
to  the  overtures.  He  spoke  for  the  neutral  powers  and  from 
the  standpoint  of  the  peace  of  the  world,  and  described  the 
peace  that  was  needed  as  " peace  without  victory,"  one  not 
dictated  by  a  victor  for  his  own  desires,  but  constructed  for 
the  purpose  of  establishing  world  peace.  He  asked  for  a 
new  and  enlarged  Monroe  Doctrine  for  all  the  world,  in 
which  the  peaceful  nations  should  join  to  prevent  the  dis 
turbance  of  the  world  by  any  nation  acting  for  its  own 
aggrandizement.  Six  months  earlier  he  had  given  his  per 
sonal  support  to  a  project  for  a  league  to  enforce  peace, 
and  in  the  autumn  had  announced  that  "America  must 
hereafter  be  ready  as  a  member  of  the  family  of  nations  to 
extend  her  whole  force,  moral  and  physical,  to  the  assertion 
of  those  rights  [of  humanity]  throughout  the  round  globe." 
He  demanded  that  the  European  powers  conclude  such  a 
peace  as  the  United  States  could  agree  to  guarantee. 

Ten  days  after  President  Wilson  spoke  in  favor  of  a  peace 
without  victory,  the  German  Government  withdrew  the 
pledges  it  had  given  after  the  sinking  of  the    Unrestricted 
Sussex,  and  inaugurated  a  new  submarine  policy,    submarine 
in  accordance  with  which  it  proposed  to  sink  on 
sight  all  Allied  vessels  found  within  the  danger  zone.     The 
note  announcing  the  new  intention  described  the  waters 
surrounding  the  British  Isles,  which  were  thus  closed  to 
neutral  commerce;  and  described  as  well  a  narrow  lane 
leading  from  the  high  seas  into  Falmouth  along  which  it 


470     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

was  proposed  to  permit  one  American  vessel  to  pass  each 
week  each  way  if  painted  in  gatfdy  stripes  according  to 
specifications  announced.  There  was  to  be  no  search  to 
determine  the  belligerent  character  of  the  vessel,  no  at 
tempt  to  convoy  it  and  its  cargo  to  a  home  port  for  trial 
before  a  prize  court,  and  no  attempt  to  safeguard  the  lives 
of  non-combatant  passengers  and  crew,  whether  subjects  of 
enemies  of  Germany  or  of  the  neutral  powers. 

This  announcement  of  the  proposed  resumption  of  un 
restricted  submarine  warfare  brought  into  effect  the  dec- 
Breach  with  laration  issued  at  the  time  of  the  sinking  of  the 
Germany  Sussex,  that  a  repetition  of  the  offenses  against 
neutral  rights  would  be  followed  by  a  severance  of  diplo 
matic  relations.  On  February  3,  1917,  von  Bernstorff  was 
formally  dismissed,  and  later  that  afternoon  the  President 
announced  the  fact  to  Congress.  ''I  think  that  you  will 
agree  with  me  that  .  .  .  this  government  has  no  alternative 
consistent  with  the  dignity  and  honor  of  the  United  States 
but  to  take  the  course  which,  in  its  note  of  the  eighteenth  of 
April,  1916,  it  announced.  .  .  .  We  do  not  desire  any  hostile 
conflict  with  the  Imperial  German  government.  We  are 
the  sincere  friends  of  the  German  people  and  earnestly 
desire  to  remain  at  peace  with  the  government  which 
speaks  for  them.  .  .  .  We  .  .  .  seek  merely  to  vindicate  our 
right  to  liberty  and  justice  and  an  unmolested  life." 

The  breach  with  Germany  brought  to  a  focus  all  the  ele 
ments  in  America  opposing  war  in  general  or  this  war  in 
Anti-war  particular ,  as  the  persons  and  organizations  con- 
agitation  cerned  brought  pressure  upon  Congress  to  pre 
vent  the  opening  of  hostilities.  William  J.  Bryan  led  in 
the  opposition  with  the  advice:  "Wire  immediately  to  the 
President,  your  Senators  and  your  Congressman.  A  few 
cents  now  may  save  many  dollars  in  taxation  and  possibly 
a  son."  The  pacifist  organizations  that  had  grown  up 
under  the  names  of  the  American  Union  against  Militarism, 
the  Women's  Peace  Party,  the  American  Neutrality  League, 
and  the  Anti-Conscription  League,  opened  headquarters  in 
New  York  on  the  Monday  following  the  breach  under  the 


THE  WAR  OF  1917  471 

name  of  the  Emergency  Peace  Federation.  Delegations  of 
pacifists  were  appointed  to  wait  upon  the  President  and 
advertisements  were  run  in  newspapers  that  had  no  sym 
pathy  with  the  obstructive  movement.  "Shall  we  allow 
the  United  States  to  be  dragged  into  the  European  quar 
rel?"  queried  one  of  these,  which  bore  the  signatures  of 
R.  S.  Bourne,  Max  Eastman,  Paul  U.  Kellogg,  Winthrop  D. 
Lane,  and  Amos  R.  Pinchot. 

Within  a  few  days  the  peace  movement  took  the  form  of 
a  demand  for  a  national  war  referendum.  Pilgrimages  to 
Washington  were  organized  to  bring  pressure  to  bear  upon 
individual  Congressmen.  "The  men  and  women  now  so 
bustling  and  multi-vocal  in  pacifism,  the  interlocking  direc 
tors  of  peace-at-any-price  societies  of  many  names,  are 
familiar  figures,  continually  reappearing  the  same  old 
'bunch  of  uplifters/"  said  the  New  York  Times. 

The  expressed  hope  of  the  President  that  the  conduct  of 
Germany  would  be  less  offensive  than  its  declaration,  and 
that  no  overt  acts  would  be  directed  against  the  Armed  mer- 
United  States  to  drive  the  country  from  non-in-  chant  shlPs 
tercourse  to  war,  produced  a  period  of  delay  following  the 
breach.  On  February  26  the  President  appeared  before 
Congress  to  ask  for  specific  power  to  defend  merchiant  ships 
in  case  they  should  be  attacked  by  submarines  in  the  course 
of  the  unrestricted  warfare.  The  status  of  the  submarine 
was  no  more  nearly  accepted  than  it  had  been  when  the  war 
fare  against  merchant  ships  began  in  1915.  The  clear  rule 
of  international  law,  requiring  the  belligerent  to  search  the 
enemy  ship  before  destroying  it,  and  requiring  condemna 
tion  before  the  prize  court  as  a  part  of  the  process,  was 
flagrantly  violated  by  the  submarine  blockade.  The  Al 
lied  Powers  maintained  that  the  submarine  blockade,  which 
was  never  effective,  and  at  no  time  stopped  the  commerce 
that  it  pretended  to  cut  off,  was  in  itself  an  act  of  piracy. 
International  law  guarantees  safety  for  the  passenger  and 

I  crew  of  the  merchant  vessel  that  does  not  attempt  flight 
from  an  enemy  warship,  and  permits  the  merchant  vessel 

i  at  its  own  risk  to  flee  or  to  try  to  defend  itself.    The  exe- 


472     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

cution  by  Germany  of  Captain  Fryatt  in  1916  for  having 
attempted  to  ram  a  German  submarine  that  sought  to  tor 
pedo  his  ship  was  in  violation  of  accepted  law.  Allied  mer 
chantmen  were  armed  by  their  Governments  for  the  pur 
pose  of  defending  themselves  against  such  piratical  attacks, 
and  President  Wilson  now  asked  specific  authority  to  defend 
American  vessels  by  similar  methods.  No  serious  overt 
act  had  yet  occurred,  but  the  threat  of  indiscriminate  sink 
ings  was  having  the  result  desired  by  Germany  in  that  it 
intimidated  many  of  the  masters  of  neutral  vessels  and  kept 
their  ships  in  port.  The  aim  of  the  submarine  blockade  was 
to  starve  the  Allied  Powers  by  cutting  off  their  foreign  com 
merce.  Prevention  was  as  useful  as  destruction. 

The  bill  affirming  the  power  of  the  President  to  place 
guns  and  guards  on  American  merchant  ships  occupied 
Senate  Congress  during  the  concluding  seven  days  of 

filibuster  jts  expirmg  Jife  The  nearness  of  the  end  of  the 
session  made  it  possible  for  the  opponents  of  a  breach  to 
delay  action  so  that  Congress  adjourned  on  March  4  with 
the  bill  unpassed.  The  Senate  was  already  engaged  in  a 
general  filibuster.  The  Republican  minority  desired  to 
force  the  President  to  summon  the  new  Congress  in  special 
session  immediately  after  March  4,  1917,  in  order  that  Con 
gress  might  be  on  hand  to  watch  whatever  international 
events  might  transpire,  and  to  keep  the  Administration 
from  playing  the  whole  part.  The  anti-war  filibuster  was 
directed  against  the  Armed  Ship  Bill  on  February  28. 
Senator  Stone,  the  chairman  of  the  Senate  Committee  on 
Foreign  Relations,  was  unwilling  to  support  the  measure, 
turning  over  its  management  to  Senator  Hitchcock,  of  Ne 
braska.  On  the  legislative  day  of  February  28  the  Senate 
sat  for  more  than  twenty-six  hours.  It  sat  for  twenty-three 
hours  on  March  i,  thirteen  hours  on  March  2,  and  for 
twenty-six  hours  on  March  3,  the  final  day  of  its  session. 
Temper  ran  high  in  the  Senate  and  outside  during  the  bitter 
struggle.  In  its  last  hours  the  supporters  of  the  bill,  realiz 
ing  that  they  could  not  pass  it,  gained  the  floor  and  held  it 
to  the  exclusion  of  its  opponents  until  the  Congress  expired 


THE  WAR  OF  1917  473 

at  noon  on  the  4th  of  March.  "When  the  history  of  these 
days  comes  to  be  chronicled,"  asserted  Viereck's  (as  The 
Fatherland  had  renamed  itself  since  the  breach  with  Ger 
many),  "the  names  of  Stone,  La  Follette,  Hearst,  and 
Bryan  will  shine  forth  like  beacon  lights  —  if  our  annals 
are  written  by  an  American  pen."  That  afternoon  Presi 
dent  Wilson  gave  out  a  public  statement  declaring  that  a 
"little  group  of  willful  men,  representing  no  opinion  but 
their  own,  have  rendered  the  great  government  of  the 
United  States  helpless  and  contemptible." 

The  filibuster  against  the  Armed  Ship  Bill  was  successful 
in  defeating  that  measure,  but  called  attention  to  the  well- 
known  fact  that  the  rules  of  the  United  States  closure  rule 
Senate  permitted  any  Senator  to  speak  as  long  m  Senate 
as  he  could  and  as  often  as  he  desired  on  any  pending  meas 
ure.  Strong-willed  Senators  in  the  past  had  repeatedly 
held  up  the  will  of  the  majority  in  the  closing  days  of  a 
session  by  speaking  for  many  hours  at  a  stretch,  and  groups 
of  such  Senators,  speaking  in  relays  and  yielding  the  floor 
to  each  other  in  turn,  were  able  to  prolong  a  filibuster  from 
hours  into  days.  The  practice  was  commonly  regarded 
as  an  abuse,  but  its  correction  was  impossible  until  public 
opinion,  now  focused  on  the  "little  group  of  willful  men," 
forced  the  Senate  to  take  action.  Twelve  men,  seven  Re 
publicans  and  five  Democrats,  had  used  their  power  to 
destroy  majority  rule.  A  majority  of  the  Senators,  ex 
cluded  from  their  power  to  vote,  signed  a  statement  de 
manding  a  closure  rule,  and  the  Senate  remained  in  special 
session  after  March  4  to  formulate  it.  On  March  8,  by  a 
vote  of  seventy-six  to  three,  a  new  rule  was  adopted  pro 
viding  a  procedure  by  which  the  majority  might  force  the 
termination  of  a  debate. 

The  failure  of  the  Armed  Ship  Bill  did  not  affect  the  de 
fense  of  American  shipping,  for  the  Attorney-General  ruled 
that  the  power  to  defend  it  already  existed,  and  guns  with 
gunners'  crewrs  were  installed  as  opportunity  offered. 

American  public  opinion  accepted  the  fact  of  the  immi 
nence  of  war  in  the  weeks  following  the  breach  with  Ger- 


474    RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

many.  Opponents  of  the  defense  measures  demanded  by 
the  Administration  found  themselVes  temporarily  outlawed 
and  the  objects  of  bitter  unpopularity.  The  country  as  a 
whole  reached  the  conviction  that  the  status  of  neutrality 
had  become  untenable,  and  that  of  the  grievances  offered 
by  the  two  sets  of  belligerents,  the  German  affront  de 
manded  immediate  action.  There  were  commercial  griev 
ances  against  the  Allies  in  connection  with- which  an  exas 
perated  correspondence  had  been  begun,  but  in  all  of  these 
it  was  certain  that  in  the  long  run  they  would  either  be 
agreed  upon  or  submitted  to  the  peaceful  process  of  an  ar 
bitration.  It  was  impossible  to  arbitrate  the  status  of 
American  women  and  children  drowning  in  the  English 
Channel.  The  submarine  attack  involved  not  only  a  limi 
tation  of  the  conceded  legal  rights  of  neutrals,  but  the  im 
mediate  murder  of  unoffending  non-combatants.  The  hope 
that  the  new  rule  of  February  i  might  somehow  or  other 
fail  to  be  enforced  yielded  to  the  national  belief  that  the 
United  States  must  associate  itself  in  defense  of  its  rights 
with  the  other  enemies  of  Germany. 

The  original  Allies  of  1914,  enlarged  a  little  later  by  the 
accession  of  Japan  and  Italy,  stated  their  case  to  the  world 
Russian  in  the  terms  of  democracy  against  military  au- 
Revolution  tocracy.  The  invasion  of  Belgium  spread  what 
might  have  been  a  local  war  in  the  Balkans,  over  Europe 
and  Asia.  Many  Americans,  however,  found  difficulty  in 
accepting  Russia  in  the  guise  of  a  foe  to  autocratic  govern 
ment.  These  found  it  easier  to  see  the  duty  to  associate 
the  United  States  with  the  Allies  when  revolution  broke  out 
in  Russia  in  March,  1917.  The  Czar  Nicholas  II  was  de 
posed,  and  a  liberal  constitutional  government  was  organ 
ized  with  Prince  Lvoff  as  Premier,  and  Paul  Milyukov  as 
Foreign  Secretary.  'The  greatest  tyranny  in  the  world 
has  fallen,"  said  the  London  Nation,  and  liberal  opinion  in 
all  of  the  Allied  countries  felt  more  certain  as  to  the  ends  of 
the  war.  The  United  States  welcomed  the  new  Russian 
Republic.  Elihu  Root  was  sent  to  Petrograd  at  the  head 
of  a  special  mission  to  congratulate  the  Provisional  Govern- 


THE  WAR  OF  1917  475 

ment,  and  to  offer  aid  and  counsel.  He  was  accompanied 
by  specialists  in  the  fields  of  industry  and  war,  including 
the  Chief  of  Staff  of  the  United  States  Army,  Major-Gen- 
eral  Hugh  L.  Scott.  Before  he  reached  Petrograd,  other 
missions  arrived  there  from  the  United  States  to  render 
Root's  success  impossible. 

The  refuge  offered  by  the  United  States  to  political  im 
migrants  from  all  the  world  had  brought  to  America  in  large 
numbers  Russians  after  the  revolutionary  movements  of 
1905.  The  Russian  immigrants  accumulated  in  increasing 
numbers,  their  children  grasped  eagerly  the  opportunities 
for  education  in  the  American  schools,  and  the  sense  of 
grievance  that  had  driven  them  from  Russia  was  directed 
against  the  Government  of  the  land  of  refuge.  The  new 
Russian  Government  called  the  exiles  home,  and  one  of 
them,  Leon  Trotzky,  speaking  in  New  York  before  his  de 
parture,  warned  the  United  States  against  assuming  "that 
the  revolution  was  necessarily  pro- Ally,"  and  avowed  that 
it  was  "  for  an  early  peace  and  a  better  form  of  government." 
Trotzky  and  his  associates  carried  back  into  Russia  the  con 
ventional  Socialist  belief  that  the  United  States  was  a  cor 
rupt  capitalistic  nation,  and  that  Root,  who  had  been  among 
the  most  prominent  of  conservative  Republicans  in  1912, 
was  the  incarnation  of  capitalism.  When  the  Root  Mission 
reached  Petrograd  it  found  that  anti-American  influences 
had  already  been  started  by  the  returned  exiles.  Tom 
Mooney  was  made  a  hero  by  the  revolutionists,  and  his 
conviction  was  noisily  accepted  as  a  proof  of  the  corruption 
of  the  United  States. 

The  progress  of  the  Russian  revolution  from  constitu 
tionalism  to  Bolshevism  was  protracted  over  eight  months. 
In  December,  1917,  the  provisional  Government,  in  which 
Lenine  and  Trotzky  had  managed  to  assume  dominant 
places,  opened  negotiations  for  a  separate  peace  with 
Germany;  but  in  the  early  stages  of  the  revolution  the 
friends  of  Russian  freedom  believed  that  the  alliance  was 
strengthened  by  the  elimination  of  the  Czar.  In  the 
United  States  the  revolution  was  the  last  fact  needed  to 


476     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

convince  the  country  that  the  cause  of  the  Allies  was  a 
cause  of  liberty  and  self-government. 

The  Sixty-Fifth  Congress,  elected  with  Wilson  in  Novem 
ber,  1916,  was  convened  on  April  2,  1917.  The  Democratic 
War  session  Party  was  able  to  organize  both  houses,  in 
of  Congress  neither  of  which,  nor  in  the  Administration 
itself,  did  the  transition  into  Wilson's  second  term  make 
any  considerable  break.  In  the  House  of  Representatives 
the  most  notable  novelty  was  Jeannette  Rankin,  of  Mon 
tana,  the  first  woman  to  be  seated  in  Congress.  In  the 
Senate  Philander  C.  Knox  returned  after  an  absence  as 
Senator  from  Pennsylvania;  and  Governor  Hiram  Johnson 
took  his  seat  as  Senator  from  California,  after  having  run 
300,000  votes  ahead  of  Hughes  in  the  November  elections. 
The  message  of  the  President,  delivered  to  Congress  on  the 
evening  of  April  2,  recited  the  grievances  of  the  United 
States  against  the  German  Government,  and  called  for  a 
declaration  of  a  state  of  war  with  "this  natural  foe  to  lib 
erty.  .  .  .  We  are  glad,  now  that  we  see  the  facts  with  no 
veil  of  false  pretense  about  them,  to  fight  thus  for  the  ulti 
mate  peace  of  the  world  and  for  the  liberation  of  its  peoples, 
the  German  people  included ;  for  the  rights  of  nations,  great 
and  small,  and  the  privilege  of  men  everywhere  to  choose 
their  way  of  life  and  of  obedience.  The  world  must  be 
made  safe  for  democracy." 

The  war  resolution,  declaring  that  a  state  of  war  existed 
against  the  Imperial  German  Government,  was  passed  on 
State  of  April  6,  1917,  and  was  proclaimed  by  the  Presi- 
war  dent.  Congress  immediately  took  up  the  varied 

tasks  of  granting  emergency  powers  to  the  Government  and 
determining  the  national  policies  upon  which  the  war  should 
be  maintained. 

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL  NOTE 

John  Spencer  Bassett,  Our  War  with  Germany  (1919),  is  a  careful  pre 
liminary  summary  of  the  war.  Useful  for  reference  are  A.  E.  McKinley 
(ed.),  Collected  Materials  for  the  Study  of  the  War  (1918);  L.  P.  Ayres,  The 
War  with  Germany  (1919),  which  is  an  official  compilation  well  filled  with 
tables  and  graphs  and  prepared  by  officers  ot  the  statistical  branch  of  the 


THE  WAR  OF  1917  477 

General  Staff.  Franus  A.  March,  History  of  the  World  War  (1919),  and 
Richard  J.  Beamish  r.nd  Francis  A.  March,  America's  Part  in  the  World 
War  (1919),  are  highly  popular  narratives  that  have  been  widely  sold. 
After  May  10,  1917,  the  best  single  source  for  material  relating  to  the  activ 
ities  of  the  United  States  is  The  Official  Bulletin,  published  daily  by  the 
Committee  on  Public  Information. 


CHAPTER  XLVIII 
WAR  PREPARATION 

"THE  departments  at  Washington  were  never  conceived  or 
organized  to  meet  the  modern  needs  incident  to  mobilizing 
a  nation,"  said  the  Philadelphia  Public  Ledger  in  comment 
upon  the  rush  of  citizens  to  Washington  to  volunteer  their 
services.  The  dismissal  of  von  Bernstorff  started  a  period 
of  national  mobilization  for  the  war  that  seemed  unavoid 
able.  The  Council  of  National  Defense,  created  in  the 
preceding  summer  to  assist  and  direct  such  mobilization, 
completed  its  organization  and  that  of  its  Advisory  Com 
mittee  early  in  February,  and  sat  behind  closed  doors  at 
the  War  Department  listening  to  the  reports  of  Kuhn,  late 
military  attache  at  Berlin,  Hoover,  whose  experiences  in 
Belgium  revealed  the  completeness  with  which  the  civil 
populations  were  organized,  and  Stettinius,  the  New  York 
banker  who  had  been  the  American  purchasing  agent  for 
the  Allies  for  many  months. 

The  Council  of  National  Defense,  an  ex-officio  body  whose 
members  were  all  busy  with  their  regular  Cabinet  depart- 
Council  of  rnents,  did  business  through  its  Advisory  Corn- 
National  mission,  of  which  Daniel  Willard,  president  of 

T~)pf  pnsP 

the  Baltimore  &  Ohio  Railroad  was  made  chair 
man.  The  seven  civilian  experts  on  the  Advisory  Com 
mission  organized  as  many  national  committees  to  deal 
with  raw  materials,  supplies,  munitions,  transportation, 
labor,  medicine,  and  education.  To  assist  in  running  these 
committees  business  men  were  taken  from  their  offices  at 
"a  dollar  a  year"  or  less,  and  there  grew  up  in  Washington, 
beside  the  agencies  of  peace-time  government,  a  civilian 
war  machine.  The  function  of  the  Council  of  National  De 
fense  was  to  create  and  advise  rather  than  administer.  Its 
numerous  committees  were  brought  into  existence  to  meet 
needs  that  were  supposed  to  exist,  and  if  they  functioned 


WAR  PREPARATION  479 

usefully  were  liable  to  be  taken  away  from  the  Council  that 
created  them  and  to  be  set  up  independently  or  attached 
to  an  appropriate  branch  of  the  Government.  Before  the 
declaration  of  war,  all  of  the  great  committees  were  in  opera 
tion.  In  many  instances  the  experiences  of  the  European 
belligerents  were  drawn  upon ;  the  military  lesson  of  the  war 
as  thus  far  seen  was  that  victory  would  go  to  the  nation 
functioning  most  nearly  as  a  unit. 

Samuel  Gompers,  one  of  the  seven  members  of  the  Ad 
visory  Commission,  organized  a  labor  committee  in  the 
latter  part  of  February,  and  brought  to  its  sup-  Labor  and 
port  the  full  strength  of  the  American  Federa-  the  war 
tion  of  Labor  and  the  conservative  labor  groups.  With 
armies  calling  for  the  military  man  power  of  every  nation, 
and  with  the  military  program  demanding  relentless  labor 
from  the  man  power  left  at  home,  national  military  strength 
was  closely  connected  with  the  spirit  and  devotion  of  wage- 
earners  in  every  country.  On  March  12  the  labor  com 
mittee  held  a  conference  at  which  the  representatives  of 
three  million  organized  workmen  were  present,  and  adopted 
a  manifesto  "to  stand  unreservedly  by  the  standards  of 
liberty  and  the  safety  and  preservation  of  the  institutions 
and  ideals  of  our  republic."  The  Government  accepted 
the  general  principle  that  the  livelihood  of  the  wage-earners 
should  not  be  allowed  to  deteriorate  because  of  the  war,  and 
labor  agreed  to  accept  the  principles  of  peaceful  settlement 
in  meeting  the  adjustments  made  necessary  by  the  shifting 
of  labor  to  war  occupations,  the  congestion  of  workers  in 
war  plants,  and  the  rising  costs  of  living. 

The  declaration  of  war  on  April  6  was  accepted  with  a 
high  degree  of  national  unity  in  which  the  expressed  convic 
tions  of  organized  labor  had  a  large  share.     The    Socialist 
degree  of  this  unity  was  measured  in  part  by    spllt 
the  roar  of  condemnation  that  greeted  the  action  of  an 
emergency  convention  of  the  Socialist  Party  held  at  Chi 
cago  on  April  7.     Here  the  majority  of  the  convention, 
presided  over  by  a  Russian  immigrant  and  supported  by 
other  foreign-born  leaders,  passed  resolutions  attacking  the 


480     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

war  as  a  conspiracy  of  capitalism.  A  minority  of  the  party 
left  it  on  this  issue  under  the  leadership  of  American 
Socialists.  "The  proclamation  reads  like  a  speech  by 
Chancellor  von  Bethmann  Hollweg,"  said  John  Spargo,  one 
of  the  resigning  leaders.  "It  requires  language  so  strong 
that  it  sounds  like  the  use  of  epithets  to  describe  the  scut 
tling  of  the  socialist  party  by  German  nationalistic  jingoes 
and  anarchistic  impossibilities  at  St.  Louis,"  said  another. 
The  pro-war  Socialists  became  one  of  the  most  active 
groups  in  interpreting  the  issues  of  the  war  to  the  aliens 
among  whom  Socialist  and  radical  labor  propaganda  found 
their  readiest  adherents. 

Every  private  agency  for  or  against  the  war  shouted  its 
advice  at  the  country  during  the  weeks  in  which  the  emer- 
Committee  gencY  was  at  its  height.  On  April  14  President 
on  Public  Wilson  added  an  official  voice  for  the  Govern- 

Information  t    .        ,r  ,  .  ^  .  T-»    i  i» 

ment  itself  by  creating  a  Committee  on  Public 
Information,  consisting  of  the  Secretaries  of  State,  War,  and 
Navy,  with  George  Creel,  a  journalist,  as  chairman.  The 
C.P.I,  opened  offices  across  Pennsylvania  Avenue  from  the 
White  House,  and  became  at  once  a  distributing  point  for 
news  of  war  activities  of  the  Government.  Its  chairman 
devoted  his  time  to  lifting  the  lid  of  secrecy  that  all  branches 
of  the  Government  tended  to  clamp  down  because  of  the 
war,  and  his  organization  acted  upon  the  assumption  that 
the  more  the  country  knew  about  the  facts  of  the  war  and 
its  causes,  the  more  completely  would  a  united  national 
opinion  stand  behind  its  prosecution.  In  the  Official  Bulle 
tin,  a  daily  newspaper  which  the  C.P.I,  published  first  on 
May  10,  1917,  the  facts  that  were  released  at  Washing 
ton  were  reprinted  for  circulation  throughout  the  country. 
As  the  war  went  on,  pamphlets  were  issued  by  the  million, 
films  were  produced,  patriotic  societies  were  encouraged, 
and  press  agencies  were  established  in  neutral  and  Allied 
countries,  all  for  the  purpose  of  laying  before  the  world  the 
facts  relating  to  the  war. 

The  nature  of  American  participation  in  the  war  was 
uncertain  at  the  date  of  its  declaration,  but  was  generally 


WAR  PREPARATION  481 

believed  to  be  of  economic  rather  than  military  character. 
There  were  no  ships  available  to  carry  troops    Emergency 
to  Europe,  even  if  there  had  been  troops  to  be    Fleet  Cor- 

,,„,  .  ...  ,  , ,  ,         Deration 

transported.  Ships  will  win  the  war  was  the 
first  phrase  that  caught  the  ear  of  the  public,  and  was  re- 
enforced  by  the  urging  of  Lloyd  George,  the  English  Prime 
Minister,  before  an  American  audience  in  London.  Up  to 
the  beginning  of  1917  the  Allies  had  lost  more  than  7,000,- 
ooo  deadweight  tons  of  shipping;  9,500,000  tons  more  were 
to  be  lost  during  1917.  The  hopes  of  Germany  were 
founded  upon  her  ability  to  hold  her  Eastern  conquests 
while  her  submarines  in  unrestricted  warfare  sunk  the  ship 
ping  of  the  Allies,  broke  their  morale,  and  starved  them 
into  submission.  The  frantic  efforts  of  the  Allied  Powers 
to  replace  their  lost  tonnage  were  unable  to  keep  up  with  the 
destruction.  During  191 5  and  1916,  their  needs  had  brought 
unwonted  activity  to  American  shipyards,  all  of  whose  ship- 
ways  came  into  use  while  new  ways  were  laid  down  to  meet 
the  foreign  demand. 

The  United  States  Shipping  Board  was  organized  during 
the  winter  of  1917,  and  during  March  and  April  accepted  in 
a  general  way  the  idea  of  building  a  "bridge  of  wooden 
ships"  across  the  Atlantic.  The  yards  equipped  to  build 
steel  ships  were  already  working  at  their  fullest  capacity, 
and  the  time  necessary  to  establish  new  yards  seemed  pro 
hibitive.  The  supplies  of  wood,  however,  were  abundant; 
labor  was  more  plentiful  in  the  regions  of  the  Southern  and 
Northwestern  forests  than  in  the  Eastern  industrial  cen 
ters  ;  the  program  of  quantity  production  of  wooden  steam 
freight  ships  of  about  thirty-five  hundred  tons  capacity  was 
accepted;  Major-General  George  W.  Goethals  was  drawn 
into  the  service  of  the  Shipping  Board  to  direct  the  con 
struction;  and  the  Emergency  Fleet  Corporation  took  out 
its  charter  on  April  16,  1917. 

The  Government-owned  corporation,  of  which  the  Emer 
gency  Fleet  Corporation  was  the  first,  was  a  new  and  dis 
tinctive  contribution  of  the  war  to  the  American  science  of 
government.  All  of  the  stock  was  purchased  with  funds 


' 
482     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

provided  by  Congress  and  became  the  capital  of  the  cor 
poration,  which  was  thereafter  arjle  to  operate  with  the 
freedom  of  any  commercial  corporation,  unhampered  by 
the  restrictions  over  expenditure  with  which  Government 
agencies  are  habitually  tied  up.  The  members  of  the  Ship 
ping  Board  elected  themselves  directors  and  officers  of  the 
corporation,  which  they  thus  interlocked  with  the  govern 
mental  agency,  while  retaining  by  the  corporation  device  a 
freedom  and  directness  of  action  otherwise  unattainable. 

The  Emergency  Fleet  Corporation  took  up  the  program 
of  wooden  ships  and  let  contracts  for  the  building  of  vessels, 
the  enlargement  of  existing  yards,  and  the  laying-out  of  new 
ones.  It  developed  also  the  idea  of  a  standardized  steel 
ship,  whose  plates  and  parts  were  to  be  made  in  quantity  in 
hundreds  of  factories  throughout  the  country.  The  parts 
were  to  be  entirely  standardized  and  shipped  to  assembling 
plants  of  which  the  greatest  was  built  below  Philadelphia 
on 'the  Delaware,  at  Hog  Island.  Here  fifty  shipways  were 
provided,  with  the  idea  of  turning  out  an  endless  series  of 
fabricated  steel  ships  to  beat  the  submarine. 

Before  May  was  over  General  Goethals  and  Chairman 
William  Denman  of  the  Shipping  Board  were  in  open  dis 
agreement  as  to  the  extent  to  which  the  shipping  program 
should  depend  upon  the  construction  of  wooden  ships. 
Goethals  shortly  resigned  his  position,  and  Denman  was 
relieved  by  the  President,  but  the  work  of  ship  construction 
continued  to  expand  until  the  war  was  over. 

The  view  that  the  United  States  could  best  assist  by 
supplying  the  Allies  with  the  means  of  war  rather  than  by 
Food  and  contributing  armies  led  to  the  second  of  the 
the  war  formulas  that  "Food  will  win  the  war."  Ger 
many,  most  narrowly  encircled  by  the  state  of  war,  had  been 
driven  to  create  a  food  dictator  in  May,  1916,  who  pro 
ceeded  to  apply  a  ration  system  in  order  to  equalize  dis 
tribution  of  food  resources.  The  shortage  of  which  this 
policy  was  the  result  grew  out  of  the  close  investment  of 
Germany  by  the  Allied  blockade,  and  gave  rise  to  the  de 
mands  from  German  sources  for  a  neutral  embargo  against 


WAR  PREPARATION  483 

England  and  for  a  broadening  of  the  submarine  campaign. 
In  November,  1916,  England  was  forced  to  establish  a  food 
controller  in  the  person  of  the  owner  of  a  great  chain  of 
retail  groceries,  Lord  Devonport,  and  the  British  Board  of 
Agriculture  undertook  a  campaign  to  increase  the  agricul 
tural  acreage,  to  bring  women  into  farm  work,  and  to  lessen 
the  dependence  of  Britain  upon  food  from  overseas. 

The  Council  of  National  Defense  early  appreciated  the 
fact  that  the  United  States  would  need  organizations  to 
stimulate  food  production  and  to  equalize  dis- 

.  IT-  *.  •        u    j     Hoover  and 

tnbution  such  as  the  European  countries  had    the  Food 


established.  The  need  was  the  more  imperative 
because  the  traditional  American  practice,  as 
expressed  in  the  anti-trust  laws,  demanded  free  competition 
and  proscribed  the  type  of  combination  needed  for  success 
ful  national  control.  The  necessities  to  which  England  and 
Germany  had  been  driven  had  been  exceeded  at  an  earlier 
period  of  the  war  by  those  of  Belgium,  overrun  and  pros 
trate  in  the  invader's  hands.  Only  the  Commission  for  the 
Relief  of  Belgium  had  saved  that  country  from,  collapse. 
Its  American  director,  Herbert  C.  Hoover,  had  learned  the 
problems  of  rationing  from  the  standpoints  of  all  the  belliger 
ents,  and  had  kept  Belgium  alive  with  the  assistance  of  large 
economic  and  dietetic  staffs.  Thework  had  been  diplomatic 
in  the  highest  degree,  for  the  employees  of  the  C.R.B.  had 
been  called  upon  to  disregard  military  frontiers,  and  to  pass 
repeatedly  through  the  lines  from  Belgium  to  Germany, 
France,  or  England.  The  fame  of  this  performance  made 
Hoover  the  natural  food  adviser  of  the  United  States.  He 
was  in  Washington  in  conference  with  the  Government  in 
February,  1917,  then  he  returned  to  Europe  to  wind  up  the 
affairs  of  the  C.R.B.,  whose  American  assistants  were  now 
forced  to  leave  Belgium,  and  in  April  he  came  back  to  the 
United  States  to  become  chairman  of  a  food  committee 
created  by  the  Council  of  National  Defense.  As  Goethals 
launched  the  Emergency  Fleet  Corporation  the  President 
asked  Congress  for  powers  with  which  Hoover  might  organ 
ize  the  food  supply.  "The  foremost  duty  of  America  to- 


484     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

ward  her  Allies  in  this  war  is  to  see  that  they  are  supplied 
with  food,"  said  Hoover  as  he  returned  to  America  to  take 
up  this  task.  When  Congress  delayed  its  compliance  with 
the  request  for  powers  in  order  to  debate  their  nature,  the 
President  on  May  19  appointed  Hoover  as  voluntary  food 
controller  with  power  to  organize  a  Food  Administration 
at  his  own  expense  and  without  legal  sanction.  It  was 
nearly  too  late  to  affect  the  crop  of  1917  by  any  agitation, 
for  the  spring  planting  was  already  under  way,  but  by 
advertisement  and  cooperation  with  the  Department  of 
Agriculture  and  the  agricultural  colleges,  the  spring  wheat 
acreage  in  the  Northwest  was  enlarged,  garden  areas  were 
multiplied  throughout  the  United  States,  and  the  saving  of 
food  was  popularized  as  a  patriotic  virtue. 

The  Council  of  National  Defense  continued  to  act  as  a 
civilian  general  staff  for  the  planning  of  agencies  to  hasten 
Raw  mate  t^ie  preparations  for  war.  Its  committee  on 
rials  and  supplies  under  Julius  Rosenwald,  of  Chicago, 

munitions  .    .    A  .  .  t     , . 

entered  into  cooperation  with  the  army  in  pre 
paring  its  contracts  and  awarding  them.  Bernard  M. 
Baruch,  in  charge  of  raw  materials,  brought  the  copper  and 
steel  producers  into  closer  relationships  with  the  Govern 
ment.  A  General  Munitions  Board  was  created  on  April  9 
to  assist  in  the  procurement  of  war  supplies,  and  like  the 
British  Munitions  Ministry  to  decide  questions  of  priority 
when  the  needs  of  the  army  and  the  navy  interfered  with 
those  of  general  industry 

A  single  munition  of  war  assumed  a  prominence  resr  • 
in  the  creation  of  the  Aircraft  Production  Board  on  Me 
Aircraft          with  Howard  E.  Coffin,  a  prominent  aul 
program         kjje  manufacturer,  as  chairman.     Airplane 
brought  great  changes  in  military  tactics.     Used  firs 
reconnaissance  and  observation,  they  placed  a  high  preaiium 
on  concealment  of  movements  behind  the  lines  as  an  element 
of  strategy,  and  brought  into  existence  the  art  of  camouflage 
Carrying  machine  guns  they  had  begun  to  be  used  for 
bat  to  attack,  first,  troops  on  the  ground,  and  then,  earl 
other  in  the  air.     Carrying  bombs,  they  had  been  u 


WAR  PREPARATION  485 

agents  of  destruction  of  railways,  factories,  and  magazines, 
and  had  been  employed  by  German  forces  for  the  terrorizing 
of  the  civilian  towns  of  England  and  France.  The  Aircraft 
Production  Board  proposed  to  develop  the  quantity  man 
ufacture  of  aircraft,  while  aviators  were  trained  by  the 
thousands  to  manipulate  them.  From  an  organization 
with  65  commissioned  officers  and  1120  enlisted  men  when 
the  war  broke  out,  the  Aviation  Section  of  the  Signal 
Corps  was  expanded,  said  the  Secretary  of  War,  until  at 
the  end  of  1917  there  were  3900  officers  and  82,120  en 
listed  men.  The  Liberty  engine  was  designed,  adopted, 
and  put  under  production,  and  Congress,  on  special  appeal 
to  assist  in  the  development  of  the  new  arm  of  the  service, 
voted  $640,000,000  in  a  single  bill  in  July,  1917. 

The  myriad  activities  in  preparation  for  war  that  were 
launched  in  March  and  April  produced  a  demand  for 
immediate  funds  that  resulted  in  the  Loan  Act 

1       i         r  War  finance 

of  April  24.  A  debate  upon  methods  of  war 
finance  began  earlier  than  the  war  itself,  and  turned  upon 
the  relative  desirability  of  loans  or  taxes.  Many  of  the 
"stop-the-war"  group,  as  they  saw  themselves  defeated 
upon  their  major  issue,  turned  their  efforts  to  the  advocacy 
of  a  "pay-as-you-go"  method  of  war  finance,  whose  pur 
pose  was  to  make  the  well-to-do  carry  the  burden  of  the 
war.  One  of  their  leaders  explained  that  a  policy  of  sup 
porting  the  war  by  means  of  taxation  and  by  seizing  all 
incomes  above  $100,000  a  year  would  have  a  tendency  to 
prevent  war.  Socialists  and  others  who  believed  that  the 
war  was  brought  on  by  capitalists  for  their  own  profit 
eagerly  supported  the  pay-as-you-go  movement.  Before 
Congress  met  many  of  its  members  were  ready  to  support 
with  their  votes  movements  for  heavy  income  and  war- 
profit  taxation. 

Although  it  was  expected  that  the  American  effort  would 
be  largely  economic,  there  were  no  estimates  as  to  the  prob 
able  cost  of  the  first  year  of  war,  and  Professor  Seligman's 
conjecture  that  it  would  run  to  the  neighborhood  of 
$10,000,000,000  was  "greeted  with  a  smile  of  incredulity." 


486     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

The  grand  total  of  national  appropriations  for  the  twenty 
years  before  the  war  was  less  than  ^17,500,000,000.  In  no 
one  year  had  the  total  appropriations  run  much  above 
$1,000,000,000.  It  was  clear,  however,  that  whatever 
theory  should  finally  be  accepted  for  raising  the  necessary 
funds,  the  United  States  must  resort  to  borrowing  until  the 
revenue  acts  should  be  passed  and  the  funds  should  become 
available.  The  President  recommended  that  the  credits 
to  be  granted  be  sustained,  "so  far  as  they  can  equitably 
be  sustained  by  the  present  generation,  by  well-conceived 
taxation." 

The  first  Loan  Bill  of  the  war  became  a  law  April  24, 
1917.  It  authorized  a  bond  issue  of  $5,000,000,000  at 
First  Lib-  three  and  a  half  per  cent  interest,  and  in  addition 
erty  Loan  to  ftiis  an  jssue  of  short-term  notes  of  $2,000,- 
000,000.  It  was  proposed  by  the  Treasury  Department  to 
sell  the  short-term  notes  as  money  was  needed  by  the  Treas 
ury  and  then  to  receive  them  back  in  return  for  bonds.  It 
was  hoped  in  this  manner  to  provide  for  a  continuous  flow 
of  funds.  About  twice  in  each  year  it  was  proposed  to  have 
a  vigorous  campaign  for  the  sale  of  bonds  to  the  people  at 
large,  and  in  anticipation  of  the  first  of  these  drives  three 
weeks  were  set  aside  about  the  first  of  June  for  the  first 
Liberty  Loan  campaign  in  which  bonds  to  the  amount  of 
$2,000,000,000  were  offered  to  the  people.  A  Liberty  Loan 
organization  was  built  up  to  aid  in  bringing  the  campaign 
for  funds  to  the  attention  of  the  citizens.  Bonds  for  as 
low  as  fifty  dollars  were  issued  so  that  no  one  need  be  unable 
to  subscribe,  and  the  national  morale  that  supported  the 
entry  into  war  at  once  stimulated  the  sale  of  Liberty  bonds 
and  was  sustained  by  it.  In  November  the  second  loan 
of  $3,800,000,000  was  placed. 

The  Bond  Act,  passed  in  the  understanding  that  the 
United  States  was  to  aid  the  other  enemies  of  Germany, 
Loans  to  provided  that  $3,000,000,000  might  be  loaned 
Allies  by  the  Treasury  Department  to  the  Allies  and 

their  associates.  Until  this  time  the  Allies  had  made  heavy 
purchases  of  raw  materials  in  America,  paying  for  them  in 


WAR  PREPARATION  487 

turn  by  their  credits  in  the  American  banks,  by  gold  shipped 
to  America  to  meet  the  balances,  by  American  securities 
sent  home  to  be  sold  in  the  open  market,  and  by  national 
loans  offered  for  subscription  in  the  United  States.  The 
gold  in  the  Treasury,  amounting  to  $1,279,000,000  on  July 
i,  1914,  rose  to  $2,445,000,000  in  April,  1917.  Hereafter 
the  Allied  purchases  were  paid  for  by  the  proceeds  of  na 
tional  loans  extended  by  the  United  States  Government. 
Before  the  end  of  the  war  Congress  had  authorized  the 
lending  of  $10,000,000,000,  of  which  $9,300,000,000  were 
actually  advanced.  The  first  American  participation  in  the 
war  was  as  banker  for  the  Allies. 

The  belief  that  the  American  contribution  was  to  be 
economic  postponed  the  date  at  which  it  was  expected  to 
have  military  forces  available  for  use,  but  did    officers' 
not  prevent  their  preparation.     The  National    training 
Defense   Act  of    1916  was    in   effect,    training 
camps  had  prepared  a  considerable  number  of  reserve  of 
ficers,  and  a  new  series  of  training  camps  was  opened  May 
15,  1917,  to  prepare  more  reserve  officers  to  be  used  first 
as  instructors  in  the  organization  of  new  divisions.     The 
National  Guard  was  recruited  to  382,000  men,  the  regular 
army  was  enlarged  by  enlistment  to  527,000,  the  navy  and 
the  Marine  Corps  by  enlistment  to  75,101,  and  the  General 
Staff  sent  into  Congress  with  the  approval  of  the  President 
a  project  for  raising  the  rest  of  the  national  army  by  a 
draft. 

The  principle  of  selective  service,  as  the  draft  of  1917  was 
called,  was  supported  on  two  theories.  There  had  been 
nothing  quite  like  it  in  American  experience.  Selective 
The  Civil  War  draft  had  been  a  method  for  stim-  service 
ulating  enlistments,  not  for  bringing  men  to  the  colors. 
The  Confederate  draft  had  been  a  means  of  coercing  a  popu 
lation.  Selective  service  was  to  be  a  means  of  raising  an 
army  at  a  time  when  young  men  were  eager  to  bear  the 
responsibility,  but  to  raise  it  in  accordance  with  the  na 
tional  need  rather  than  individual  enthusiasm  or  patriotism. 
Great  arnies  were  to  be  raised,  but  they  were  also  to  be 


488     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

provided  with  military  implements  and  their  dependents  at 
home  were  to  be  regarded  as  entitled'to  maintenance  by  the 
nation.  In  England,  where  the  armies  had  been  filled  by 
volunteers,  national  industry  had  been  crippled  by  the 
patriotic  spirit  that  took  skilled  men  from  their  shops  to  the 
front,  and  the  burden  of  society  had  been  increased  by  the 
dependent  families  left  behind. 

The  principle  of  selective  service  was  debated  until  the 
middle  of  May,  and  became  a  law  on  the  i8th.  The  office 
of  the  Provost  Marshal-General  was  revived  to  administer 
it,  and  draft  boards  were  organized  throughout  the  nation 
to  cooperate  in  the  registration  of  men  of  draft  age,  from 
twenty-one  to  thirty,  and  in  their  classification.  "  If  farms, 
factories,  railroads,  and  industries  were  not  to  be  left  crip 
pled,  if  not  ruined,  by  the  indiscriminate  volunteering  of 
key  and  pivotal  men,"  said  the  Provost  Marshal-General  in 
his  report  upon  the  new  national  departure,  "then,  in  the 
face  of  such  an  enemy  as  Germany,  the  total  military  ef 
fectiveness  of  the  nation  would  have  been  lessened  rather 
than  strengthened  by  the  assembling  of  1,000,000  volun 
teers." 

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL  NOTE 

The  Annual  Reports  of  the  Council  of  National  Defense,  the  United 
States  Shipping  Board,  and  the  Provost  Marshal-General,  E.  H.  Crowder, 
are  as  yet  the  best  sources  for  the  details  of  war  organization.  W.  F. 
Willoughby,  Government  Organization  in  War-Time  and  After  (1919),  gives 
a  general  survey,  which  may  be  checked  in  some  details  by  F.  L.  Paxson, 
"American  War  Government,  1917-1918,"  in  American  Historical  Review, 
October,  1920,  and  by  A  Handbook  of  Economic  Agencies  for  the  War  of 
1917  (1919),  which  was  compiled  in  the  historical  branch  of  the  General 
Staff.  Newton  D.  Baker,  Frontiers  of  Freedom  (1918),  is  a  compilation  of 
occasional  addresses.  George  Creel,  How  We  Advertised  America  (1920), 
is  a  history  of  the  Committee  on  Public  Information.  Edwin  N.  McClellan, 
The  United  States  Marine  Corps  in  the  World  War  (1920),  is  an  official  his 
tory,  largely  statistical.  F.  \V.  Halsey,  Balfour,  Viviani,  and  Jo/re  (1917), 
gives  the  story  of  the  British  and  French  military  missions.  Theodore 
Roosevelt,  The  Foes  of  Our  Own  Household  (1917),  includes  the  correspond 
ence  relating  to  the  proposed  volunteer  division. 


CHAPTER 
LAUNCHING  THE  A.E.F. 

THE  Selective  Service  Act  became  a  law  on  May  18.  Upon 
signing  it  the  President  announced  that  John  J.  Pershing, 
junior  major-general  on  the  active  list,  would  be  General 
sent  to  France  at  the  earliest  possible  date  in  Pershmg 
command  of  a  small  contingent  of  American  troops,  and 
that  a  great  army  would  be  raised  as  soon  thereafter  as  possi 
ble.  A  few  days  later  the  orders  issued  to  the  commander 
of  the  American  expeditionary  forces  reminded  him  that 
"the  underlying  idea  must  be  kept  in  view  that  the  forces 
of  the  United  States  are  a  distinct  and  separate  component 
of  the  combined  forces."  At  the  date  of  his  appointment 
Pershing  was  in  command  of  the  American  troops  on  the 
Mexican  Border,  where  he  had  succeeded  the  late  Major- 
General  Frederick  A.  Funston-  His  earlier  military  career 
had  been  most  intimately  associated  with  the  Philippine 
Islands,  where  his  successes  as  a  junior  officer  inspired  Pres 
ident  Roosevelt  in  1905  to  promote  him  over  902  seniors 
on  the  army  list  to  be  a  brigadier-general.  So  far  as  he  had 
party  affiliations,  he  was  known  as  the  son-in-law  of  Sena 
tor  Francis  E.  Warren,  a  Republican  of  Wyoming.  Among 
his  seniors  were  Hugh  L.  Scott,  Chief  of  Staff,  who  was 
abroad  with  the  mission  to  Russia;  Tasker  H.  Bliss,  who 
was  acting  Chief  of  Staff;  and  Leonard  Wood,  a  former 
Chief  of  Staff. 

The  decision  to  send  an  expeditionary  force  to  France 
was  a  departure  from  the  views  that  had  prevailed  in  Wash 
ington  a  few  weeks  before.     When  the  original    joffre  and 
plan  for  raising  the  army  was  designed  in  April,    Balfour 
"there  was  no  intention  whatever  of  sending  any  troops 
abroad  until  March,  1918."     The  Quartermaster-General, 
with  the  assistance  of  the  Council  of  National  Defense, 
placed  his  first  orders  with  this  in  view.     The  change  in 


490    RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

intention  came  within  a  few  hours  after  a  French  warship 
passed  in  at  the  Capes  of  the  Chesapeake  on  April  24  bear 
ing  Marshal  Joffre,  Viviani,  and  a  French  military  mission 
for  a  conference  with  the  United  States.  "Let  the  Ameri 
can  soldier  come  now"  was  the  message  they  brought  from 
France  who  had  borne  the  heaviest  impact  of  the  war  for 
thirty-three  months,  and  whose  morale  needed  the  stimulus 
of  a  visible  aid  from  America  if  it  was  to  hold  until  the 
American  weight  could  be  brought  upon  the  line.  A.  J. 
Balfour  with  a  British  mission  arriving  about  the  same  time 
told  the  same  story.  As  a  result  of  their  arguments  "it 
was  determined  to  begin  at  once  the  dispatch  of  an  expedi 
tionary  force  of  the  American  army  to  France." 

The  naval  participation  of  the  United  States  had  become 
a  fact  two  weeks  before  the  appointment  of  Pershing  was 
Naval  par-  announced.  In  anticipation  of  the  state  of  war 
ticipation  Rear  Admiral  William  S.  Sims,  president  of  the 
Naval  War  College  at  Newport,  was  ordered  to  England  at 
the  end  of  March  to  cooperate  with  the  British  naval  forces 
in  the  blockade  of  Germany.  A  flotilla  of  destroyers  fol 
lowed  him  in  April,  and  arrived  at  Queenstown  May  4. 
"When  will  you  be  ready  for  business? "  inquired  the  British 
naval  officer  as  he  greeted  their  commander  after  his  voy 
age  across  the  Atlantic.  "We  will  start  at  once,"  was  the 
reply. 

In  addition  to  maintaining  an  increasing  fleet  of  destroy 
ers  on  the  blockade  and  on  convoy  duty,  the  navy  added 
a  squadron  of  battleships  and  undertook  to  close  the  North 
Sea  by  a  barrage  of  mines  in  order  to  prevent  the  egress 
of  submarines.  A  new  type  of  contact  mine  was  subse 
quently  invented,  manufactured,  and  transported;  and 
56,611  such  mines  were  planted  by  American  mine-layers 
between  the  Orkney  Islands  and  the  coast  of  Norway,  con 
stituting  four  fifths  of  the  whole  barrage  which  extended 
across  two  hundred  and  thirty  miles  of  sea.  Small  de 
stroyers  were  built  by  scores  to  watch  for  submarines. 

After  a  few  days  spent  in  Washington,  Pershing  with  a 
little  staff  went  quietly  to  England,  and  then  to  France, 


LAUNCHING  THE  A.E.F.  491 

\ 

where  on  June  26,  1917,  he  was  joined  by  units  of  the  first 
division,  regular  army  troops,  who  had  arrived    pershing 
at   Brest.    On  July  4  he  marched   the  troops    inFrance 
that  Joffre  had  called  for  through  the  streets  of  Paris. 

The  headquarters  of  the  A.E.F.  were  maintained  at  Paris 
for  a  few  weeks  while  Pershing  studied  the  military  situa 
tion  on  the  western  front  and  made  his  plans  for   American 
the  organization,  training,  and  operation  of  his    base  in 
forces.     At  the  end  of  August  he  moved  his  head 
quarters  halfway  across  France  to  the  ancient  town  of 
Chaumont  where  he  was  within  easy  striking  distance  of 
his  sector  on  the  western  front,  and  the  training  areas  pro 
vided  for  the  American  divisions. 

The  western  front  of  1917  was  battered  but  unbroken 
after  three  years  of  war.  Each  side  had  repeatedly  shown 
that  it  was  possible  to  bend  the  line,  but  neither  had  pos 
sessed  the  continued  power  to  break  through.  The  un 
willingness  of  the  United  States  to  permit  its  troops  to  be 
used  for  replacements  in  the  British  and  French  armies,  as 
the  Allies  would  have  preferred,  made  it  necessary  to  assign 
a  sector  to  the  forces  under  Pershing.  England  was  already 
in  possession  of  the  northern  end  of  the  line  with  her  sup 
plies  in  the  rear  connected  by  her  network  of  military  rail 
roads  with  the  French  and  Belgian  Channel  ports.  It 
could  not  be  suggested  that  she  entrust  the  defense  of  the 
Channel  to  another  force  or  abandon  the  short  lines  of  com 
munication  between  her  armies  and  London.  For  France 
the  vital  strategic  factor  was  the  defense  of  Paris,  and  from 
that  city  the  net  of  railroads  to  her  front  was  such  that  no 
foreign  military  force  could  be  thrust  in  and  be  of  service. 
The  American  forces  had  not  even  been  assembled  when 
Pershing  took  up  the  question  of  their  disposition  with  the 
English  and  the  French.  He  received  as  his  assignment  the 
quiet  sector  between  the  great  fortresses  of  Belfort  and  Ver 
dun.  Here  the  American  armies  could  do  the  least  damage 
if  ineffective,  and  here  they  could  be  supplied  without  bring 
ing  disorder  to  the  British  and  French  lines  of  communi 
cation  north  of  Paris. 


492     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

The  same  reasons  that  assigned  Pershing  to  the  region 
of  Chaumont  required  him  to  utilize  as  seaport  bases  the 
French  shore  south  of  Brest.  There  was  equal  determina 
tion  that  the  American  forces  should  remain  a  unit  and  that 
they  should  not  constitute  a  burden  upon  France,  The 
collier  Jupiter,  laden  with  ten  thousand  tons  of  wheat,  pre 
ceded  the  arrival  of  the  first  contingents  in  France,  and 
engineer  regiments,  railroad  regiments,  and  forestry  regi 
ments  followed  to  take  possession  of  the  seaport  towns. 
They  dredged  the  harbors,  and  opened  channels  up  the 
tidal  rivers.  They  built  docks  and  constructed  railway 
sidings  where  their  gantry  cranes  could  lift  their  cargoes 
from  the  steamship  hold  to  the  waiting  freight-car.  They 
constructed  assembling  plants  where  the  freight-cars  and 
the  locomotives  as  they  came  from  the  United  States  were 
put  together.  They  rebuilt  the  light  French  railroads  to 
carry  heavy  American  rolling  stock  from  Brest  to  Le  Mans, 
from  Saint-Nazaire,  La  Pallice,  and  Bordeaux  to  Tours, 
and  thence  across  France  south  of  Paris  to  the  Chaumont 
region,  where  the  main  lines  were  sprayed  out  in  branches 
toward  the  battle  front. 

At  Tours  Pershing  erected  a  secondary  headquarters  for 
the  Services  of  Supply.  All  along  the  lines  of  communi 
cation  from  the  seaboard  bases  through  the  intermediate 
regions  to  the  zone  of  advance,  cantonments  were  erected 
and  schools  prepared  to  house  and  train  the  troops  as  they 
should  come,  while  the  departments  in  Washington  were 
instructed  to  forward  the  materials  of  war  upon  tables  of 
automatic  supply.  Each  increment  of  twenty-five  thou 
sand  troops  was  to  bring  with  it  an  initial  equipment  and 
every  month  thereafter  for  each  similar  number  of  troops 
overseas  supplies  were  to  be  forwarded  in  accordance  with 
the  tables.  The  correspondent  of  the  London  Times  who 
inspected  the  American  plant  in  France  in  February,  1918, 
declared  that  there  was  "no  question  that  the  General  Staff 
of  the  army  is  delivering  supplies  and  material  upon  the 
longest  lines  of  communication  in  the  annals  of  war." 

The  preparations   for  an   independent   army,   powerful 


A  rvtr  ver«p?  > 

i     APWchalo/ 


THE  AMERICAN  BASE 
IN 

FRANCE 

Base  Section 
Intermediate  Section 
Advance  Section 
Battle  Line  of  March  21, 1918 


£        General  Headquarters        ©    Hq.  Services  at  Supply      Q      Principal  Ports 
•          Secondary  Ports  o        Important  Towns 

—   Main  Lines    +  + -I- -h  Second  Lines     Third  Lines      i  I  I  1 1   Other  Line 8 

Note:    Large  Numbers  and  Letters  indicate  designation  of  sections 


494     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

enough  to  turn  the  balance  on  the  western  front,  retarded 
Divisions  the  development  of  an  imposing  force  of  combat 
of  1917  troops.  Before  1917  was  ended  there  were  only 

five  divisions  on  the  soil  of  France,  the  1st  and  2d,  composed 
of  units  selected  from  the  regular  army ;  the  26th,  made  out 
of  the  National  Guard  of  New  England;  the  42d,  or  Rain 
bow  Division,  composed  of  picked  units  from  the  National 
Guard  of  all  the  States,  and  the  4 1st,  which  never  had 
a  combat  record,  but  remained  a  depot  and  replacement 
division  through  whose  Units  227,000  replacement  troops 
passed  on  their  journey  to  the  front.  The  32d  Division  of 
Wisconsin  and  Michigan  National  Guardsmen  was  added 
in  February;  and  in  March,  1918,  there  were  250,000 
American  troops  in  France,  more  than  half  of  whom  were 
technical  troops  devoted  to  the  construction  of  the  American 
plant. 

It  was  the  belief  in  April,  1917,  that  American  troops 
would  not  be  needed  in  large  numbers,  and  that  if  needed 
they  could  not  be  transported.  In  anticipation  of  their 
coming  the  German  submarine  campaign  was  pushed  to  its 
highest  effectiveness.  In  August,  1917,  an  American  em 
barkation  service  was  organized  to  take  charge  of  the  troops 
and  freight  as  they  were  presented  at  Atlantic  ports  for 
transportation.  From  a  modest  beginning  of  131,000  dead 
weight  tons  in  August,  1917,  the  transport  fleet  grew  to 
2,700,000  dead -weight  tons  in  the  final  month  of  the  war, 
and  when  in  the  spring  of  1918  the  need  came  for  immediate 
American  assistance  the  embarkation  service,  with  the  aid 
of  British  ships,  carried  safely  to  France  or  England  nearly 
ten  thousand  troops  a  day  for  five  consecutive  months. 

While  Pershing  was  laying  the  foundations  for  the  A.E.F., 
the  units  of  the  regular  army  and  the  National  Guard  were 
Nation-  being  raised  to  their  full  quotas  by  the  induc- 
al  Army  tjon  of  volunteers.  It  was  possible  to  use  these 
existing  military  units  as  training  schools  for  the  new  re 
cruits  until  such  time  as  it  might  be  practicable  to  proceed 
in  the  formation  of  new  units.  The  division  of  about 
twenty-seven  thousand  officers  and  men  became  the  unit  for 


LAUNCHING  THE  A.E.F.  495 

training.  It  was  decided  to  rearrange  the  whole  existing 
force  and  to  assimilate  the  drafted  men  in  a  single  army 
organization  of  which  the  divisions  numbering  one  to 
twenty-five  should  be  founded  upon  regular  army  units,  the 
numbers  twenty-six  to  seventy-five  were  reserved  for  divi 
sions  made  out  of  the  National  Guard,  while  those  num 
bered  seventy-six  and  higher  were  to  be  entirely  new  and 
made  up  of  National  Army  men.  In  the  summer  of  1918 
the  distinctions  existing  between  the  different  varieties  of 
divisions  were  abolished,  and  all  were  merged  in  the  single 
Army  of  the  United  States  and  wore  the  same  insignia. 
Few  of  the  divisions  long  retained  much  of  the  local  char 
acter  with  which  some  of  them  started  out.  In  every  divi 
sion  gaps  were  filled  by  replacements  without  reference  to 
their  origin.  Units  and  individuals  were  constantly  trans 
ferred  from  one  division  to  another.  The  small  number  of 
regular  soldiers  in  the  service  in  April,  1917,  were  scattered 
so  widely  throughout  the  whole  force  that  the  so-called 
regular  divisions  were  regular  only  in  name.  The  National 
Guard  divisions  retained  their  identity  a  little  longer,  but 
only  seven  of  the  seventeen  divisions  organized  from  this 
source  contained  less  than  twenty-five  per  cent  of  draft 
members  when  they  sailed  for  France,  and  all  of  them  tended 
as  the  war  went  on  to  approximate  more  closely  the  other 
divisions  of  the  National  Army. 

The  determination  to  raise  an  army  of  indefinite  size 
by  means  of  a  draft  made  it  necessary  to  provide  hous 
ing  accommodations  to  be  ready  as  soon  as  the 

...  .  T  The  draft 

recruits  assembled.     On  registration  day,  June    and  officers' 


5,  1917,  9,586,508  men  enrolled  themselves  as 
liable  to  service.  In  the  ensuing  three  months 
they  were  arranged  in  sequence  in  their  several  districts, 
with  their  order  of  liability  fixed  by  a  lottery  that  took  place 
on  July  20,  in  anticipation  of  the  calling  of  the  first  quotas 
to  duty  in  September.  While  this  work  was  going  on  with 
the  assistance  of  4557  local  draft  boards,  the  selection  of 
cantonment  sites  was  being  followed  by  the  adoption  of 
standardized  plans  for  barracks  and  other  buildings,  by 


496    RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

the  letting  of  contracts,  and  the  hurried  mobilization  of 
armies  of  workmen  in  the  building  trades  to  get  ready  for 
the  arrival  of  the  first  half-million  men.  The  regular  di 
visions  were  put  together  at  posts  throughout  the  South, 
and  sixteen  temporary  cantonments  were  provided  in  the 
South  for  as  many  divisions  of  the  National  Guard.  In 
addition  to  these  the  42d  or  Rainbow  Division  was  as 
sembled  at  Camp  Mills  on  Long  Island  and  started  over 
seas  in  October,  1917.  For  the  sixteen  divisions  of  the 
National  Army  first  organized,  sixteen  permanent  camps 
were  built,  most  of  them  in  the  Eastern  States,  and  scat 
tered  from  Camp  Devens  in  Massachusetts  to  Camp  Travis 
in  Texas.  These  camps  were  built  of  wood  and  later  pos 
sessed  an  average  capacity  of  48,000  men.  In  addition  to 
the  thirty-three  new  divisional  camps  numerous  smaller 
camps  were  brought  into  existence  for  the  specialized  serv 
ices,  artillery,  aviation,  engineer  corps,  and  others,  and 
for  embarkation  near  New  York  and  Newport  News.  The 
construction  division  that  prepared  this  physical  plant  was 
conducted  by  officers,  mostly  commissioned  directly  from 
civil  life,  from  the  ranks  of  engineers  and  contractors. 

The  officers'  training  camps  opened  in  May,  1917,  and 
graduated  in  August  their  first  class  of  first  and  second 
lieutenants.  They  were  followed  by  a  second  series  on  Au 
gust  27,  and  a  third  in  January,  1918.  In  no  earlier  war 
had  the  United  States  safeguarded  the  health  and  comfort 
of  its  soldiers  by  requiring  that  line  command  should  be 
exercised  only  by  men  with  some  specialized  training  for 
the  task.  The  boys  accepted  as  candidates  for  commis 
sions  included  the  pick  of  the  college  classes  of  1917  and 
1918.  In  the  fourth  series  of  camps  organized  in  May, 
1918,  the  emergency  need  for  officers  had  been  met,  and 
most  of  the  candidates  were  drawn  directly  from  the  ranks 
of  men  already  in  the  service.  The  graduates  of  the  offi 
cers'  training  camps  were  assigned  to  the  new  divisions  as 
these  were  formed,  but  this  was  only  the  beginning  of  their 
training.  When  they  arrived  in  France  every  one  was  sent 
to  school,  the  enlisted  men  to  the  infantry  and  artillery 


LAUNCHING  THE  A.E.F.  497 

training  areas,  while  their  officers  were  detailed  to  the 
specialized  schools  for  the  innumerable  new  services  that 
had  become  a  part  of  the  operation  of  an  army. 

The  principles  of  selective  service  and  special  training  for 
line  command  were  emphasized  by  the  refusal  of  President 
Wilson  to  permit  the  private  recruiting  that  had  The  Roose_ 
been  a  part  of  every  earlier  American  war.  velt  Divi- 
Colonel  Roosevelt's  desire  to  be  allowed  to  raise 
a  division  and  to  command  one  of  its  infantry  brigades  was 
widely  discussed  while  the  Draft  Law  was  in  Congress.  In 
the  Spanish  War  his  regiment  of  "Rough  Riders,"  which 
Leonard  Wood  and  he  commanded  in  turn,  had  shown 
private  recruiting  at  its  best.  At  the  end  of  the  Santiago 
campaign  he  was  a  colonel  commanding  an  infantry  brigade, 
and  he  now  wished  to  reenter  the  service  at  this  rank. 
It  was  believed  by  many  that  the  inspiration  derived  from 
Roosevelt  at  the  front  would  have  sustained  the  morale  of 
the  Allied  cause,  for  no  other  American  was  so  universally 
admired  or  so  widely  known.  His  friends  in  Congress 
sought  to  make  it  mandatory  upon  the  President  to  permit 
him  to  recruit  a  division.  The  law  passed  authorizing,  but 
not  commanding,  such  a  course.  As  he  signed  the  bill 
President  Wilson  stated  that  he  would  not  avail  himself  of 
the  authorization.  "This  is  not  the  time  or  the  occasion," 
he  declared,  "for  a  compliment  or  for  any  action  not  cal 
culated  to  contribute  to  the  immediate  success  of  the  war. 
The  business  now  in  hand  is  undramatic,  practical,  and  of 
scientific  definiteness  and  precision.  I. shall  act  with  regard 
to  it  at  every  step  and  in  every  particular  under  expert  and 
professional  advice,  from  both  sides  of  the  water.  .  .  .  The 
first  troops  sent  to  France  will  be  taken  from  the  present 
forces  of  the  regular  army  and  will  be  under  the  command 
of  trained  soldiers  only." 

In  the  Espionage  Act  of  June  15,  1917,  the  United  States 
Government  was  given  powers  to  combat  any  attempt  that 
might  be  made  to  obstruct  the  administration    The  Espi- 
of  the  draft  or  to  weaken  the  morale  of  troops    onage  Act 
while  training.     There  was  wide  difference  of  opinion  as  to 


498     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

the  extent  of  sedition  and  the  proper  measures  for  its  sup 
pression.  The  European  countries  had  become  used  to 
censorship  in  all  of  its  forms,  and  bills  were  introduced 
in  Congress  conferring  on  the  Government  powers  for  the 
censorship  of  the  press.  These  powers  were  never  granted 
and  no  censorship  of  the  press  existed  except  one  of  volun 
tary  character  in  which  the  newspapers  of  the  country,  under 
the  leadership  of  the  Committee  on  Public  Information,  co 
operated  in  the  preservation  of  military  secrets.  The  Espi 
onage  Act  forbade  aid  to  the  enemy  and  the  spreading  of 
information  intended  to  cause  insubordination,  disloyalty, 
or  mutiny  in  the  military  forces.  The  Postmaster-General 
was  given  power  to  rescind  the  mailing  privileges  of  news 
papers  and  individuals  offending  against  the  act.  The 
prosecutions  in  enforcement  of  the  Espionage  Law  were 
few  in  comparison  with  the  number  of  Americans  of  alien 
origin  who  might  have  been  supposed  likely  to  need  watch 
ing.  The  greatest  difficulties  were  with  Socialist  and 
other  radical  leaders  whose  normal  political  language  be 
came  menacing  in  war-times.  The  Department  of  Justice 
organized  a  volunteer  association,  the  American  Protective 
League,  that  grew  to  have  two  hundred  and  fifty  thousand 
associates  pledged  to  report  evidence  as  to  disloyalty.  In 
ternment  camps  received  a  few  thousand  Germans  believed 
to  be  dangerous,  the  federal  jails  a  few  more  charged  with 
resisting  the  draft  and  other  crimes,  but  in  general  <the  Se 
lective  Service  Act  enforced  itself  because  it  had  public 
opinion  behind  it.  . 

As  the  draft  was  administered,  exemption  from  military 
service  was  accorded  to  men  of  military  age  because  of 
physical  and  mental  defects,  dependent  families,  and  the 
importance  of  their  civil  occupations.  In  the  first  quotas 
called  for  September,  1917,  speed  was  imperative,  for  the 
new  machinery  was  as  yet  imperfect  and  the  men  were 
needed  in  the  camps.  In  December,  1917,  all  registrants 
still  in  civil  life  were  rearranged  by  a  system  of  question 
naires  in  a  new  classification  based  upon  industrial  impor 
tance,  and  subsequent  calls  were  thereafter  taken  from  men 


LAUNCHING  THE  A.E.F.  499 

in  Class  I,  who  were  generally  liable  to  service  and  without 
dependents. 

For  the  benefit  of  dependent  families  of  men  who  vol 
unteered  and  to  fulfill  the  national  obligation  to  the  men 
themselves  due  to  the  risks  of  war,   Congress    Warrisk 
extended   the  principle  of  employers'   liability    andallow- 

s-\  T^I         ances 

over  the  armed  forces  in  October,  1917.  Ihe 
history  of  pension  legislation  since  the  Civil  War  told  the 
story  of  national  obligation  and  of  the  difficulties  of  meeting 
it  by  subsequent  legislation.  The  new  law  attempted  to 
anticipate  or  to  avoid  the  problems.  By  rigorous  physical 
examination  men  of  unsound  physique,  liable  to  collapse 
under  military  strain,  were  excluded  from  the  forces.  If 
men  with  families  dependent  upon  them  entered  the  service, 
they  were  required  to  make  allotments  from  their  pay  for 
the  benefit  of  the  family,  while  the  United  States  added 
to  this  a  family  allowance  based  upon  nearness  of  kin  and 
number  of  dependents.  The  Bureau  of  War  Risk  Insur 
ance  of  the  Treasury  Department  was  enlarged  to  insure 
the  whole  military  force,  with  provisions  for  payments  in 
the  event  of  death  or  complete  disability  and  of  proportional 
amounts  for  partial  disability.  The  maimed  soldier  was 
promised,  in  addition  to  this,  reeducation  at  the  national 
expense  in  case  he  returned  from  war  shell-shocked  or 
crippled  and  unable  to  resume  his  former  place.  The 
Federal  Board  for  Vocational  Education  was  given  charge 
of  the  administration  of  this  guarantee.  In  addition  to 
the  liability  that  the  United  States  assumed  toward  every 
soldier,  the  latter  was  permitted  if  he  desired  to  take  out 
life  insurance  at  cost  to  the  maximum  of  ten  thousand  dol 
lars,  and  in  all  of  the  cantonments  insurance  officers  were 
appointed  to  persuade  the  men  to  take  out  the  maximum 
with  premiums  charged  against  their  pay.  By  the  time  the 
war  risk  legislation  was  enacted  Congress  had  completed  a 
summer  of  prolonged  discussion,  and  had  laid  down  the 
fundamental  policies  upon  which  the  United  States  was  to 
fight  the  war. 


500    RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 


BIBLIOGRAPHICAL.  NOTE 

The  Final  Report  of  General  John  J.  Pershing,  Commander-in-Chief, 
American  Expeditionary  Forces  (1919),  is  well  illustrated  with  official 
maps,  and  provides  an  excellent  guide  to  the  military  operations.  Fred 
erick  Palmer,  America  in  France  (1918),  is  the  work  of  a  trained  journalist 
who  was  attached  to  G.H.Q.  for  historical  work.  Isaac  F.  Marcosson, 
S.O.S.  (1919),  gives  a  description  of  the  services  of  supply  that  were  di 
rected  from  Tours.  William  Crozier,  Ordnance'and  the  World  War  (1920), 
relates  to  a  single  aspect  of  war  preparation.  Katherine  Mayo,  "  That 
Damn  Y"  (1920),  is  the  result  of  an  investigation  of  the  work  of  the 
Y.M.C.A.  On  the  navy,  consult  William  S.  Sims,  The  American  Navy  in 
the  War  (1920);  John  L.  Leighton,  " Simsadus:  London":  At  U.S.  Naval 
Headquarters  Abroad  (1920);  and  Navy  Ordnance  Activities:  World  War 
1917-1918  (1920),  which  is  an  official  history  of  the  Bureau  of  Naval 
Ordnance. 


CHAPTER  L 
WAR  POLICIES 

THE  American  legislation  of  1917  divides  itself  roughly  into 
two  classes,  one  having  to  do  chiefly  with  emergencies  that 
must  be  met  without  delay,  and  the  other  comprising  poli 
cies  whose  full  effect  could  come  only  with  the  lapse  of  time. 
The  authorization  of  the  first  Liberty  Loan  and  the  deter 
mination  to  finance  the  Allies  belong  to  the  emergency 
measures  that  were  enacted  without  prolonged  debate. 
In  this  class  also  falls  the  Selective  Service  Act,  in  whose 
acceptance  there  was  an  almost  unanimous  agreement. 
While  Congress  was  enacting  the  emergency  laws,  its  com 
mittees  were  discussing  permanent  policies  for  bringing  the 
full  strength  of  the  United  States  i'nto  the  war. 

The  World  War  brought  into  existence  new  weapons  that 
changed  the  character  of  strategy  and  altered  the  position 
of  both   the   non-combatant   and   the   neutral.    New  con- 
Aircraft,  the  submarine,  poison  gases,  and  the    ditions  of 
tanks  were  all  added  into  the  arsenal  of  physical 
weapons.      Propaganda  and  the  censorship  were  brought 
to  play  upon  men's  minds,  to  weaken   the  resistance  of 
the  enemy,  or  to  encourage  the  spirit  of  the  nation  using 
it.     Before  the  United  States  was  drawn  into  the  war  the 
position  of  the  neutral  had  been  made  almost  unbearable 
by  "a  new  war  weapon  against  Germany —  a  noiseless  and 
unseen  weapon."     This  was  the  embargo. 

The  anciently  admitted  right  of  the  belligerent  to  block 
ade  or  invest  his  enemy  and  starve  him  into  submission 
carried  with  it  a  right  never  denied  by  neutrals    Neutral 
to  search  merchant  vessels  on  the  high  seas,  to    trade 
seize  contraband  goods  where  they  could  be  found,  and  to 
seize  both  the  cargo  and  the  vessel  carrying  it  in  an  attempt 
to  violate  a  blockade.     The  inconvenience  caused  by  these 
conceded  rights  would  have  been  great  enough  to  disor- 


502     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

ganize  the  life  of  neutral  nations  if  no  additional  means  of 
restricting  trade  with  the  enemy  had  been  discovered.  The 
Allies  before  1917  relied  chiefly  upon  the  law  of  contraband 
and  the  doctrine  of  ultimate  enemy  destination  in  their 
attempts  to  bring  economic  pressure  upon  the  Central 
Powers.  Friction  and  inconvenience  resulted,  but  since 
the  Allies  were  ready  to  purchase  most  of  the  cargoes  they 
intercepted,  and  since  their  assertions  of  enemy  destination 
were  generally  well  founded,  no  neutral  nation  offered  to 
defend  its  immunity  in  trade  with  a  belligerent  by  going  to 
war  about  it.  As  the  war  progressed  the  Allies  discovered 
attempts  to  evade  the  consequences  of  enemy  destination. 
The  people  of  Holland  and  Denmark  shipped  their  butter 
fats  to  Germany  and  themselves  consumed  oleo  that  they 
purchased  in  Allied  countries.  In  many  ways  it  was  found 
possible  to  sell  the  Central  Powers  a  commodity  originating 
in  Continental  neutral  countries  and  to  replace  it  with  an 
Allied  or  other  neutral  Commodity.  The  effect  of  this  was 
identical  with  that  of  the  method  of  direct  importation  by 
way  of  the  Allied  countries,  and  it  left  the  enemies  of  Ger 
many  in  the  situation  of  provisioning  her  through  the  con 
nivance  of  neutrals.  The  Allied  blockade  broke  up  the 
direct  maritime  trade  with  Germany,  and  then  the  indirect 
trade  upon  the  principle  of  enemy  destination,  and  finally 
the  Allied  Governments  undertook  to  prohibit  trade  with 
the  neutrals  unless  assured  that  the  commodities  so  imported 
would  not  release  others  for  the  benefit  of  Germany. 

The  United  States  suffered  from  loss  of  the  profitable 
trade  with  Germany  and  European  neutrals  that  might 
have  been  enjoyed  had  the  Allies  permitted  it,  or  had  Great 
Britain  been  willing  to  furnish  her  own  ships  to  carry  it. 
Since  the  United  States  had  little  merchant  marine  and 
American  exports  had  been  habitually  carried  in  the  ships  of 
countries  now  at  war,  there  had  been  much  inconvenience 
and  considerable  hard  feeling  due  to  the  pressure  of  the 
Allied  embargo.  As  a  tool  of  war,  however,  the  weapon  was 
both  permissible  and  effective,  and  the  Espionage  Act  of 
June  15,  1917,  carried  a  provision  for  the  control  of  exports. 


WAR  POLICIES  503 

Vance  McCormick,  who  had  been  chairman  of  the 
Democratic  National  Committee  in  1916,  was  made  chair 
man  of  the  Exports  Administrative  Board,  appointed  under 
this  act.  The  exports  of  the  United  States  were  to  be  con 
trolled  by  a  system  of  licenses  for  the  purpose  of  preventing 
their  reaching  the  enemy,  and  conserving  them  for  the  use 
of  the  United  States  and  its  associates  in  the  war.  Neutrals 
were  not  to  be  hampered  in  their  reasonable  needs  so  far  as 
these  could  be  provided  without  injury  to  the  Allied  cause 
or  without  aiding  the  enemy.  As  the  summer  advanced  the 
number  of  commodities  affected  was  increased  through  ex 
tensions  of  the  prohibited  list  and  the  exports  conservation 
list,  and  to  these  there  was  added  the  control  of  bunker  coal. 
By  refusing  to  sell  coal  to  neutral  vessels  in  American  ports 
until  these  contracted  to  refrain  from  carrying  cargoes  use 
ful  to  the  enemy  and  agreed  to  a  trade  acceptable  to  the 
United  States,  it  was  possible  to  extend  the  influence  over 
the  war  trade 

Power  to  control  imports  into  the  United  States  was 
voted  in  August,  and  on  October  6  Congress  brought  to 
gether  other  provisions  relating  to  the  embargo  The  War 
in  the  Trading  with  the  Enemy  Act.  The  War  Trade  Board 
Trade  Board,  of  which  McCormick  remained  the  chairman, 
took  over  and  enlarged  upon  the  work  of  the  Exports 
Administrative  Board  to  stop  all  trade  with  the  enemy, 
to  conserve  American  exports,  and  to  restrict  the  imports. 
Tonnage  was  so  short  that  it  could  not  be  spared  for  un 
necessary  cargoes.  All  imports  were  under  license  by 
February,  1918,  and  the  technical  bureaus  of  the  War 
Trade  Board  issued  the  licenses  as  it  was  shown  that  the 
imports  could  not  be  done  without  or  replaced  by  similar 
commodities  of  American  origin. 

In  breaking  up  trade  with  the  enemy,  the  War  Trade 
Board  undertook  to  stop  the  trade  with  enerrw  subjects 
wherever  they  might  reside,  and  created  an  intelligence  di 
vision  to  gather  information,  which  was  embodied  in  lists 
of  enemy  firms  with  whom  trade  was  prohibited.  The  office 
of  Alien  Property  Custodian,  created  by  the  same  act,  was 


504     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

administered  by  A.  Mitchell  Palmer,  who  took  possession 
as  public  trustee  of  the  property  of  enemies  or  others  re 
siding  in  enemy  countries.  The  property  of  enemy  aliens 
residing  in  the  United  States  and  not  violating  the  law  was 
not  interfered  with. 

Before  the  full  organization  of  war  trade  had  taken  place, 
Congress  had  passed  other  measures  for  the  conservation  of 
Food  and  food  and  fuel  in  the  Lever  Act  of  August  10, 
fuel  control  lgl?  The  additional  powers  to  stimulate  the 
production  of  food  and  to  control  its  disposition  within  the 
United  States  were  asked  for  in  April,  but  were  not  granted 
until  August.  The  debates  over  the  Food  and  Fuel  Act 
revealed  the  permanence  of  the  distrust  of  combinations 
that  pervaded  the  Progressive  movement.  Fear  that  the 
power  to  control  the  necessities  of  life  might  be  misused  for 
the  advantage  of  a  few  citizens,  inspired  protracted  opposi 
tion  to  the  bill.  While  the  debate  was  pending  the  Depart 
ment  of  Agriculture  used  its  existing  organization  to  en 
courage  the  planting  of  larger  crops  than  usual,  and  asked 
for  an  appropriation  to  make  a  food  inventory  of  the  United 
States.  The  voluntary  Food  Administration  under  Hoover 
was  created  in  May,  when  it  seemed  likely  that  the  debate 
would  indefinitely  postpone  the  grant  of  the  desired  power 
to  bring  the  food  industry  under  license.  The  danger  of 
sugar,  flour,  and  potato  famines,  accompanied  by  hoarding 
and  extortionate  prices,  were  among  the  visible  reasons  for 
granting  the  powers.  There  was  no  danger  that  the  United 
States  would  starve,  but  there  was  need  to  conserve  to  the 
uttermost  in  order  to  increase  the  surplus  for  export  to  the 
Allies,  and  to  prevent  improper  hoarding  and  speculation. 

Upon  the  passage  of  the  Lever  Act,  Hoover  was  ap 
pointed  Food  Administrator,  and  on  August  23  President 
Harry  A.  Garfield,  of  Williams  College,  was  made  Fuel 
Administrator,  after  sitting  on  a  commission  that  fixed  the 
price  of  wheat  at  $2.20  a  bushel.  The  Grain  Corporation 
took  out  a  charter  from  the  State  of  Delaware  with  officers 
provided  by  the  Food  Administration,  and  with  a  capital 
stock  of  fifty  million  dollars  owned  by  the  Government. 


WAR  POLICIES  505 

Its  duty  was  to  buy  and  distribute  the  crop  of  1917,  and 
administer  the  established  price.  A  year  later  the  Sugar 
Equalization  Board  was  similarly  incorporated  to  stabilize 
the  price  of  sugar  and  equalize  its  distribution.  The  per 
capita  consumption  of  wheat  in  the  United  States  was  re 
duced  from  5.3  bushels  per  year  to  4.12  bushels  in  the  first 
year  of  war.  The  reduction  was  brought  about  by  the 
campaign  for  conservation  and  the  use  of  substitutes,  with 
wheatless  days  and  meatless  days  popularized  through  the 
cooperation  of  the  State  Food  Administrations,  and  with  a 
resulting  surplus  of  food  released  for  shipment  to  the  Allies. 

The  Fuel  Administration  took  over  work  that  had  been 
begun  by  one  of  the  committees  of  the  Council  of  National 
Defense  and  used  its  powers  to  increase  the  activities  of  the 
mines  and  to  meet  the  demands  of  mining  labor.  Its  effec 
tiveness  was  involved  with  that  of  the  railroads  of  the  coun 
try,  because  in  many  of  the  mines  there  were  no  facilities 
for  storage,  and  the  output  was  dependent  upon  the  ability 
of  the  railroads  to  provide  empty  coal  cars  at  the  mine 
mouth.  There  were  no  available  figures  on  the  capacity  of 
either  the  railroads  to  provide  the  cars  or  the  mines  to  fill 
them,  and  the  work  of  the  Fuel  Administration  was  forced 
to  include  a  new  economic  study  of  the  industry  in  which  the 
experts  of  the  Bureau  of  Mines  played  an  active  part. 

The  oil  division  of  the  Fuel  Administration  was  added  in 
January,  1918,  because  of  the  growing  importance  of  fuel 
oil  and  gasoline.  This  was  a  motorized  war,  with  armies 
moving  by  motor  truck  and  with  aircraft  propelled  by 
gasoline  engines.  The  varying  requirements  of  different 
kinds  of  motors  made  the  question  of  specifications  inter 
national  in  character,  while  the  need  arose  to  conserve  the 
particular  grades  of  gasoline  most  valuable  for  the  use  of 
aircraft,  and  ultimately  to  limit  the  use  of  any  kind  of 
gasoline  for  pleasure  purposes. 

The  debate  in  Congress  upon  war  policies,  whether  of 
emergency  or  permanent  character,  began  before    Revenue 
the  declaration  of  war  and  was  continuous  until    Act  of  I917 
Congress  adjourned  on  October  6.    It  ranged  from  the  merits 


506     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

of  the  war  itself  to  the  treatment  of  sedition,  the  freedom 
of  the  press,  the  management  of  armies,  and  the  national 
control  of  trade.  On  October  3  a  War  Revenue  Act  was 
passed,  after  the  most  persistent  of  the  discussions  which 
involved  theories  of  finance.  The  Revenue  Act  of  1917 
was  not  constructed  with  reference  solely  to  the  finances 
of  the  war.  There  was  a  wide  agreement  that  taxes  must 
be  increased  not  only  to  the  extent  at  which  they  would 
cover  the  normal  running  expenses  of  the  Government  to 
gether  with  interest  and  sinking-fund  charges  upon  the 
debt,  but  beyond  that  until  they  should  carry  a  considera 
ble  portion  of  the  current  expenses  of  war.  The  great  de 
bate  over  the  proportion  of  military  expenses  to  be  borne 
directly  by  taxation  was  colored  by  the  demands  of  leaders 
who,  having  opposed  the  war,  wished  to  make  it  unpopular; 
of  others  who,  believing  the  war  to  be  due  to  a  conspiracy  of 
wealth,  wanted  to  punish  the  holders  of  wealth;  and  of  still 
others  who  saw  an  opportunity  to  correct  inequalities  in  the 
distribution  of  wealth  or  to  destroy  certain  types  of  wealth 
entirely.  The  demand  for  taxes  ranged  from  a  minimum 
that  would  carry  only  the  fixed  permanent  charges  to  a 
maximum  that  would  confiscate  enough  of  the  accumula 
tions  of  the  frugal  and  the  fortunate  to  pay  the  whole  of  the 
war  expense  out  of  current  revenue.  Socialist  leaders, 
agrarian  politicians,  and  progressive  farmers  who  had  long 
been  warring  upon  accumulated  wealth,  led  the  attack 
against  bond  issues  and  in  favor  of  taxation.  They  were 
supported  by  what  remained  of  the  organized  pro-German 
sentiment. 

Of  the  available  sources  for  taxation,  the  tariff,  formerly 
the  chief  reliance  of  the  nation,  had  lost  much  of  its  impor 
tance.  Its  revenues  were  uncertain  because  of  the  war 
time  interruption  of  foreign  trade  and  the  deliberate  efforts 
of  such  agencies  as  the  War  Trade  Board  to  reduce  it  to  its 
lowest  terms.  There  remained  the  excise  and  the  income 
tax,  over  whose  details  the  debate  proceeded.  The  great 
controversy  came  over  the  amount  of  the  normal  income 
tax  and  its  exemption  limit ,  and  the  rate  to  be  applied  to 


WAR  POLICIES  507 

the  particular  forms  of  income  due  directly  to  the  war.  It 
was  obvious  that  huge  fortunes  were  accruing  to  some  citi 
zens  because  of  their  war  contracts,  and  to  others  who  were 
able  to  profiteer  because  of  the  increased  demands  for  the 
necessities  of  life.  The  degree  to  which  these  persons 
should  be  allowed  to  enjoy  profits  because  of  the  war  was 
always  present  in  the  discussion,  with  each  side  attacking 
the  motive  of  the  others.  The  act  as  passed  was  based  upon 
a  graduated  excess  profits  tax,  ranging  from  twenty  to  sixty 
per  cent  of  the  war  excess  over  the  profits  of  the  pre-war 
years,  1911-13.  It  included  an  income  tax  beginning  with 
a  rate  of  four  per  cent  upon  individual  incomes  over  a 
thousand  dollars,  and  heavy  increases  in  the  excise  taxes 
upon  tobacco  and  alcoholic  drinks,  transportation,  luxuries 
and  amusements,  and  letter  postage.  The  final  measure 
was  opposed  by  representatives  of  business  who  said  that  it 
took  too  much,  and  by  pay-as-you-go  advocates,  who  said 
that  it  took  too  little.  The  revenues  received  under  the 
law  in  1918  were  $3,696,000,000. 

The  debate  on  war  taxation  was  only  begun  when  the 
Revenue  Act  of  1917  was  passed,  after  six  months'  debate. 
In  the  spring  of  1918  Secretary  McAdoo  invited  Congress  to 
begin  upon  a  revision  that  might  be  expected  to  raise  in  1919 
a  third  of  the  total  current  cost  of  the  war,  and  a  bill  de 
signed  to  raise  approximately  six  billion  dollars  by  taxation 
was  before  Congress,  for  eight  more  months  of  the  same 
type  of  debate  that  prevailed  in  1917.  The  extremists  who 
thought  the  law  of  1917  inadequate  were  much  comforted 
by  the  demand  of  the  Administration  for  even  heavier  rates 
than  they  had  urged,  and  proceeded  to  advocate  more  ad 
vanced  proposals  for  the  conscription  of  private  property. 
This  Revenue  Act  was  not  passed  until  February,  1919. 

The  money  raised   by  taxation  during  the  war  period, 
April,  1917,  to  October,  1919,  aggregating  $11,- 
280,000,000,  fell  far  short  of  the  expenditures    expendi-' 


of  the  same  period,  which  ran  to  $26,007,000,-    f^s,  and 

ooo,   not  including  $9,406,000,000  lent  to  the 

Allies.    The  grand  total  raised  and  expended  or  lent  during 


508     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

these  three  years,  $35,413,000,000,  made  necessary  the  de 
velopment  of  Me  Adoo's  system  of  continuous  revenue  and 
the  floating  of  five  great  national  loans.  The  continuous 
revenue  device  made  it  possible  for  the  Treasury  to  meet 
the  financial  needs  as  they  arose  without  withdrawing 
greater  amounts  of  capital  from  industry  than  were  im 
mediately  needed.  At  intervals  of  about  two  weeks  the 
banks  of  the  country,  reached  through  the  federal  reserve 
system,  were  invited  to  buy  short-term  certificates  of  in 
debtedness,  in  a  fixed  percentage  of  their  total  assets.  As 
the  Liberty  Loan  drives  produced  subscriptions  for  the  long- 
term  bonds,  these  payments  were  deposited  in  the  banks, 
and  the  latter  paid  the  Treasury  for  the  bonds  as  issued 
with  their  accumulations  of  certificates.  Four  Liberty  Loan 
drives  were  conducted  in  June  and  November,  1917,  and 
May  and  September,  1918.  They  were  followed  by  a  fifth 
"Victory"  drive  in  April,  1919.  They  brought  into  the 
Treasury  the  savings  of  more  than  sixty-five  million  sub 
scribers,  and  funds  as  follows: 

I  — $2,000,000,000 
II-  -    3,808,766,150 

III-  -   4,176,516,850 

IV-  6,964,524,650 
V-  -   4,498,312,650 

The  total  of  the  five  loans  amounted  to  $21,448,120,300. 

The  repeated  campaigns  for  the  sale  of  Liberty  bonds 
served  not  only  as  a  means  of  raising  needed  funds,  but 
Civilian  played  an  unmeasured  part  in  sustaining  the 
cooperation  pUbiic  opinion  of  the  Linked  States,  in  populariz 
ing  the  aims  of  the  war,  and  in  suppressing  opposition  to  it. 
The  Liberty  Loan  organization,  directed  by  the  Treasury 
Department,  was  based  upon  committees  in  the  federal 
reserve  districts,  and  these  in  turn  on  similar  bodies  in  the 
several  States  and  in  their  cities  and  counties.  Members  of 
these  committees,  drawn  into  Government  service  during 
the  drives,  educated  themselves  as  well  as  their  fellow-citi 
zens  to  whom  they  sold  their  bonds.  Masses  of  explanatory 


WAR  POLICIES  509 

literature  were  prepared  for  their  use,  flying  squadrons  of 
speakers  were  sent  throughout  the  country  to  explain  the 
loans.  The  Committee  on  Public  Information  published 
pamphlets  by  the  million  in  a  dozen  languages :  How  the  War 
Came  to  America,  The  War  Message  and  the  Facts  Behind  It, 
The  President's  Flag  Day  Speech,  German  War  Practices, 
The  War  Cyclopedia,  Conquest  and  Kultur.  The  Four- 
Minute  Men  were  organized  by  the  Committee  on  Public 
Information  to  speak  in  motion-picture  theaters,  and  in 
cluded,  by  the  autumn  of  1918,  43,000  volunteer  orators, 
whose  message  it  was  impossible  for  the  most  indifferent  to 
evade. 

The  work  of  these  cooperative  organizations  in  unifying 
public  opinion  was  further  extended  by  the  State  Councils 
of  Defense.  These  were  formed  everywhere  upon  recom 
mendation  of  the  Council  of  National  Defense,  and  built  up 
local  systems  of  county  councils,  which  sometimes  reached 
down  into  ward  and  precinct  committees.  The  Food  Ad 
ministration  added  a  similar  network  of  committees  of  its 
own;  the  American  Red  Cross,  reorganized  for  war  in  May, 
1917,  added  still  another  organization  and  called  for  volun 
tary  contributions  by  the  hundred  million.  By  the  autumn 
of  1917  service  flags  appeared  spontaneously  throughout 
the  country,  boasting  by  their  stars  the  members  of  each 
household  that  were  with  the  colors.  The  window  emblem 
of  the  Liberty  Loans  advertised  the  subscribers  to  the  patri 
otic  funds,  and  the  banner  of  the  Red  Cross  took  its  place 
by  the  side  of  these,  while  the  pledge  cards  of  the  Food  Ad 
ministration  were  added  to  the  group.  The  citizen  work 
ing  at  war  tasks  wore  the  numerous  buttons  of  his  or 
ganizations,  and  every  day  national  understanding  of  the 
causes  of  the  war  became  clearer,  and  it  was  more  difficult 
for  disloyalty,  stupidity,  or  dissent  to  hold  its  own. 

Congress  closed  its  war  session  in  October,  and  at  the 
same  time  occurred  the  last  of  the  open  mani-    peopie's 
festations  of  disapproval  of  the  war.     The  anti-    Council  for 
war  group,  never  very  large,  became  more  stub 
born  and  persistent  33  it  lost  its  audience.     It  received  a 


510     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

new  inspiration  from  the  progress  of  the  Russian  Revo 
lution,  which  in  the  spring  of  191 7  demanded  a  speedy 
peace  based  upon  a  doctrine  of  "no  annexation,  no  in 
demnities."  An  international  conference  of  Socialists  was 
summoned  to  meet  at  Stockholm  during  the  summer,  to 
bring  about  a  peace  in  spite  of  the  Governments,  and  was 
supported  by  the  Governments  in  Russia  and  the  Central 
Powers.  In  the  United  States  the  People's  Council  for 
Democracy  and  Terms  of  Peace  was  organized  by  a  So 
cialist-pacifist  combination  at  Madison  Square  Garden  on 
May  30.  It  began  a  propaganda  for  immediate  peace  that 
was  continued  for  the  next  three  months.  The  American 
Alliance  for  Labor  and  Democracy  was  organized  by  the 
leaders  of  the  American  Federation  of  Labor  and  the  pro- 
war  Socialists,  and  in  September  the  debate  came  to  a  crisis 
and  end  in  Minnesota. 

The  center  of  disaffection  with  the  war  lay  in  the  upper 
Mississippi  Valley,  drawing  many  of  its  supporters  from 
National  the  German  populations  in  Illinois  and  Wiscon- 
imammity  sjn>  ancj  tne  radical  farmers  of  Iowa,  Minnesota, 
and  North  Dakota.  The  People's  Council  proposed  to  hold 
a  national  convention  at  Minneapolis,  whither  it  was  in 
vited  by  the  Socialist  mayor  of  that  city.  The  special 
train  that  started  from  New  York  with  the  delegates  to  the 
council — the  "rabbit  special"  as  its  critics  called  it — re 
ceived  a  different  sort  of  publicity  from  that  which  it  desired. 
The  American  Alliance  for  Labor  and  Democracy  trailed  it 
with  a  special  train  carrying  supporters  of  the  war.  The 
governor  of  Minnesota  refused  to  let  the  pacifist  meeting 
take  place  within  his  State,  and  the  baffled  opponents  of  the 
war,  instead  of  setting  the  prairies  aflame  for  peace,  drifted 
back  to  their  homes,  excluded  from  auditoriums  and  hotels. 
Hereafter  the  movements  in  opposition  were  less  conspicu 
ous.  The  Postmaster-General  barred  from  the  mails  So 
cialist  papers  like  the  Milwaukee  Leader  and  the  Masses, 
and  friends  of  free  speech  complained  of  a  national  intol 
erance  that  refused  to  listen  to  dissent  or  allow  it  a  public 
hearing.  But  the  same  intolerance  revealed  substantial 


WAR  POLICIES  511 

national  unanimity  and  a  fixed  determination  to  see  the 
war  through  to  a  victorious  conclusion.  The  opposition  in 
Congress  confined  itself  to  a  criticism  of  war  policies  in  de 
bate.  On  the  final  passage  of  the  war  measures  few  cared 
to  vote  in  the  negative. 

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL  NOTE 

Louis  E.  Van  Norman,  War-Time  Control  of  Commerce  (1919),  describes 
the  workings  of  the  War  Trade  Board;  further  details  of  operations  are  in 
The  Journal  of  the  War  Trade  Board.  A  supplement  to  the  American 
Economic  Review,  March,  1919,  is  entitled  "War  Finance,"  and  contains 
special  technical  papers  on  that  theme.  The  Annual  Reports  of  the  Secre 
tary  of  the  Treasury,  1917-19,  are  ot  course  valuable.  The  continuous 
revenue  device  is  treated  in  Jacob  H.  Hollander,  War  Borrowing:  A  Study 
of  Treasury  Certificates  of  Indebtedness  of  the  United  States  (1919).  See  also 
Z.  Chandler,  Freedom  of  Speech  (1920). 


CHAPTER  LI 
CONSERVATION 

IN  the  winter  of  1917-18  the  war  passed  into  its  darkest 
period,  in  which  the  victory  of  Germany  seemed  to  be  al- 
The  winter  most  complete  and  there  was  reason  to  fear  that 
of  1917-18  the  United  States  had  joined  too  late.  On  the 
western  front  in  the  spring  the  German  army  had  somewhat 
shortened  its  length  of  trenches  by  retiring  to  the  Hinden- 
burg  Line  between  Arras  and  Soissons.  Three  times  during 
the  year  the  British  forces  tried  in  vain  to  break  the  position. 
On  the  Italian  front  an  Austrian  drive  under  German  leader 
ship  poured  down  the  slopes  of  the  Alps  from  the  Isonzo 
across  the  Tagliamento  to  the  Piave.  The  Russian  Revo 
lution  ended  the  active  fighting  on  the  eastern  front,  and 
released  German  divisions  for  a  new  effort  in  1918  to  destroy 
the  power  of  the  Allies  before  American  troops  could  be 
available. 

In  the  United  States,  as  this  darkest  period  of  the  war 
approached,  there  prevailed  everywhere  noisy  congestion 
and  confusion,  with  new  programs  in  every  line  of  war 
activity  in  operation,  with  none  of  them  complete,  and  with 
many  of  them  encroaching  on  each  other.  Conservation  was 
the  dominant  note  of  the  approaching  winter,  with  priority 
as  its  most  important  element. 

The  word  "priority"  acquired  significance  in  the  United 
States  when  it  became  apparent  that  war  needs  would  require 
Control  of  more  railroad  cars,  more  tons  of  coal  and  steel, 
priorities  ancj  more  labor  than  the  land  possessed  and 
when  it  became  impossible  to  permit  each  agency  of  Govern 
ment  and  every  private  business  to  serve  its  own  needs  in 
the  open  market  to  the  exclusion  of  the  national  program. 
There  was  not  yet,  in  1917,  a  real  national  program,  but 
lessons  were  being  learned  that  entered  into  the  making  of 
one.  In  August  Congress  prepared  to  meet  the  crisis  by 


CONSERVATION  513 

authorizing  the  President  to  give  preference  to  such  rail 
way  traffic  as  appeared  to  be  essential  for  national  defense. 
Under  this  act  Judge  Robert  S.  Lovett  was  appointed 
director  of  priority  and  began  his  work  by  giving  coal  ship 
ments  to  Lake  Erie  ports  preference  over  all  other  freight 
in  order  to  meet  the  Northwest  need  for  winter  coal.  In 
subsequent  priority  circulars  he  classified  the  freight  that 
presented  itself  for  shipment  and  gave  the  right  of  way  to 
that  belonging  to  the  army,  the  navy,  or  the  Emergency 
Fleet  Corporation.  His  work  marks  the  beginning  of  ac 
tual  Government  control  over  industry,  as  distinguished 
from  the  earlier  mobilization  of  industry  to  meet  the  needs 
of  war. 

The  War  Industries  Board  was  created  in  July,  1917,  to 
hasten  the  mobilization  of  industry  and  its  control,  and  was 
the  outgrowth  of  a  series  of  experiments  that    The  War 
had   been   begun   in   the    Council   of   National    industries 

.  .  Board 

Defense  early  in  the  year.  The  various  com 
mittees  created  by  the  Advisory  Commission  were  in  con 
tinuous  cooperation  with  the  Government  in  the  early 
weeks  of  the  war,  and  one  of  them,  on  Munitions  Standards, 
sought  to  work  out  an  approach  to  uniformity  in  the  require 
ments  of  the  various  righting  units.  This  committee  on 
April  9  was  reorganized  as  the  General  Munitions  Board 
with  Frank  A.  Scott  as  chairman,  and  set  out  to  formulate 
"a  system  for  clearing  the  needs  of  the  army  and  navy,  and 
for  having  the  needs  brought  before  the  people."  For  the 
next  three  months  the  General  Munitions  Board  worked  with 
the  cooperative  committees  of  industry  of  the  Council  of 
National  Defense  on  the  one  hand,  and  the  buying  agents 
of  the  army,  navy,  and  Emergency  Fleet  Corporation  on 
the  other.  There  was  necessary  confusion  in  the  work  be 
cause  of  the  great  number  of  independent  agencies  author 
ized  by  law  to  buy  for  the  Government,  and  because  of  the 
lack  of  legal  power  in  the  General  Munitions  Board  to  com 
pel  coordination.  In  the  navy  there  existed  already  a  con 
solidated  buying  system,  but  in  the  army  each  of  the  sepa 
rate  services  had  been  allowed  to  purchase  for  itself,  with 


514     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

the  result  that  the  Chief  of  Ordnance^  the  Chief  of  Engineers, 
the  Chief  Signal  Officer,  the  Quartermaster-General,  and 
the  Surgeon-General  entered  the  crowded  markets  to  bid 
against  each  other  for  supplies  of  the  same  type.  The  en 
suing  competition  raised  the  price  to  the  Government  and 
to  the  Allies,  who  were  buying  in  American  markets  with 
American  funds,  and  it  favored  the  trade  of  the  contract 
broker,  who  took  Government  contracts,  expecting  not  to 
fulfill  them,  but  to  sublet  them.  The  Council  of  National 
Defense  sought  to  keep  track  of  the  contracts  as  they  were 
let,  and  to  prepare  some  kind  of  a  picture  of  the  military 
contracts  of  the  United  States.  Its  statistical  division 
formed  for  this  purpose  was  subsequently  taken  into  the 
army  as  the  statistical  branch  of  the  General  Staff. 

Before  the  Government  had  proceeded  far  with  the  let 
ting  of  contracts,  Washington  filled  up  with  agents  seeking 
them,  and  with  disappointed  bidders  complaining  at  their 
misfortune.  The  system  of  sub-committees  came  under 
fire  because  it  often  happened  that  committeemen  chosen 
by  Baruch  or  Rosenwald  because  of  their  expert  knowledge 
of  raw  materials  or  supplies  were  forced  to  pass  upon  bids 
tendered  by  the  very  companies  that  had  released  them 
for  Government  service.  The  services  of  the  dollar-a-year 
man  were  in  many  instances  given  to  the  Government  by 
his  former  employer  who  continued  to  pay  his  salary.  The 
disappointed  bidder,  failing  to  secure  his  Government  con 
tract,  was  enabled  to  charge  that  it  had  been  awarded  to  a 
rival  firm  through  favoritism.  Other  complaints  were  due 
to  the  newness  of  the  committee  system  and  the  inexperi 
ence  of  many  of  the  committeemen  with  Washington  habits 
of  business  and  the  law.  In  their  discussions  of  the  Food 
and  Fuel  Act  pending  in  Congress  opponents  of  food  con 
trol  denounced  the  work  of  the  sub-committees,  and  incorpo 
rated  in  the  act  passed  on  August  10  a  clause  forbidding 
agents  of  Government  to  act  in  the  award  of  contracts  in 
which  they  had  any  financial  interest. 

Before  this  act  was  passed  the  General  Munitions  Board 
was  rearranged  on  July  28  and  became  the  War  Industries 


CONSERVATION  515 

Board  with  Scott  still  chairman.  The  new  board  was 
designed  to  concentrate  and  standardize  buying  methods. 
It  included,  in  addition  to  the  chairman,  representatives  of 
the  army  and  navy,  Baruch  in  charge  of  raw  materials, 
Brookings  for  finished  products,  Hugh  Frayne,  a  representa 
tive  of  labor,  and  Judge  Lovett,  commissioner  of  priorities. 
The  sub-committee  system  inaugurated  by  the  Council  of 
National  Defense  was  gradually  reorganized  between  the 
creation  of  the  War  Industries  Board  in  July  and  the  disso 
lution  of  the  committees  on  supplies  in  November.  Scott, 
who  retired  as  chairman  of  the  War  Industries  Board  be 
cause  of  ill-health,  was  succeeded  by  Daniel  Willard  in 
November,  whose  position  was  somewhat  similar  to  that  of 
chief  of  a  Munitions  Ministry. 

A  new  arrangement  for  bringing  the  resources  of  indus 
try  to  the  service  of  the  nation  was  inaugurated  in  Decem 
ber,  1917,  at  the  instance  of  the  United  States  War  service 
Chamber  of  Commerce.  Since  it  had  proved  committees 
impracticable  to  permit  contracts  to  be  awarded  by  men 
who  were  on  temporary  leave  from  their  industries,  the 
Chamber  of  Commerce  recommended  at  its  annual  meeting 
in  September  that  the  several  industries  organize  themselves 
and  create  war  service  committees,  voluntarily  empowered 
to  bind  each  its  whole  industry  in  dealing  with  the  Govern 
ment.  Upon  the  initiative  of  the  Chamber  of  Commerce 
more  than  five  hundred  such  committees  were  formed  based 
upon  the  cooperation  of  the  rival  members  in  every  indus 
try.  The  committees  came  to  Washington  to  aid  the  Gov 
ernment.  Some  of  them,  like  the  Iron  and  Steel  Institute, 
the  Tanners'  Council,  the  Textile  Alliance,  and  the  Chemi 
cal  Alliance  (for  their  titles  were  by  no  means  uniform) 
opened  elaborate  central  offices  in  Washington  to  keep  the 
trade  and  the  Government  in  continuous  contact.  The 
committees  helped  to  award  contracts  and  with  equal 
readiness  abolished  unnecessary  styles,  standardized  their 
output,  consented  to  curtailments  of  output,  and  in  some 
cases  to  discontinuance  as  non-essential. 

To  cooperate  with  the  war  service  committees  the  War 


516     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

Industries  Board  organized  a  long  Hst  of  commodities  sec 
tions  directed  by  managers  who  were  compelled  to  separate 
themselves  from  business.  In  the  commodities  sections  the 
production,  needs,  and  statistics  of  the  various  trades  were 
assembled  and  studied,  and  when  any  of  the  other  agencies 
of  Government  needed  to  be  brought  in  contact  with  a 
given  industry,  the  meetings  took  place  at  the  War  Indus 
tries  Board  in  the  presence  of  the  commodity  chief  and  the 
war  service  committee  of  the  industry. 

The  new  organization  of  the  War  Industries  Board  and 
war  service  committees  was  developed  between  December, 
Congestion  IQI?,  and  February,  1918,  when  the  air  was  full 
of  transport  o£  ominous  threats  that  the  organization  was  too 
late,  and  that  military  preparation  had  already  broken  down. 
The  most  visible  sign  of  the  breakdown  was  congestion  on 
the  railroads  with  loaded  freight-cars  crowding  the  tracks 
around  the  ports  of  embarkation,  and  munition  or  shipyard 
plants,  and  with  shippers  throughout  the  United  States 
clamoring  for  cars  they  could  not  get.  In  every  field  of 
war  preparation  contracts  had  been  let  by  guesswork  in 
the  previous  spring,  since  no  branch  of  the  Government 
had  ever  been  empowered  to  determine  a  schedule  of  re 
quirements.  In  the  early  summer  the  factories  made  their' 
readjustments  to  make  war  supplies,  ships,  guns,  railroad 
materials,  explosives,  automobiles,  aeroplanes,  uniforms, 
and  the  other  thousands  of  items  needed  in  the  war.  New 
factories  were  established  and  added  to  the  confusion  by 
demanding  building  materials  and  labor  to  construct  their 
plants.  In  the  autumn  of  1917  finished  supplies  began  to 
leave  their  factories  for  delivery  at  the  shipping  points  or 
at  the  assembling  plants  of  the  Fleet  Corporation.  Their 
sudden  pressure  upon  the  railroads  came  in  the  worst 
months  of  the  severest  winter  known  in  a  generation. 

The  American  railroad  plant  was  underbuilt  and  in  bad 
repair  when  the  war  broke  out.  For  several  years  railroad 
companies  had  been  ground  between  the  upper  millstone 
of  inflexible  rates  fixed  by  public  authority  and  the  lower 
millstone  of  rising  costs.  The  fifteen-year  fight  for  Gov- 


CONSERVATION  517 

ernment  control  had  placed  the  common  carriers  under 
minute  public  regulation.  The  margin  of  profit  in  opera 
tion,  out  of  which  the  railroads  were  accustomed  to  main 
tain  their  plants  and  make  their  betterments,  was  cut  down. 
With  income  thus  reduced,  it  became  more  difficult  to  bor 
row  at  a  reasonable  figure,  for  lenders  insisted  upon  a 
reasonable  return,  which  the  best-managed  railroads  could 
not  guarantee.  In  passing  the  Adamson  Law  in  1916,  Con 
gress  added  to  the  financial  burdens  of  the  carriers  without 
providing  extra  revenues  to  meet  them 

The  Army  Act  of  1916,  contemplating  that  in  the  event  ^ 
of  war  it  might  be  necessary  for  the  Government  to  operate 
the  railroads,  granted  such  power  to  the  Presi-  Railroads' 
dent ;  but  he  refrained  from  using  the  power  in  War  Board 
the  early  months  of  the  war.  The  American  Railway 
Association  was  called  into  conference  with  the  Council 
of  National  Defense  in  February  and  acted  as  a  Transporta 
tion  Committee  for  the  Council.  On  April  II  it  organized 
a  Railroads'  War  Board  with  Fairfax  Harrison,  president  of 
the  Southern  Railway,  as  chairman.  This  body  took  charge 
of  the  tracks  and  rolling  stock  of  all  the  lines  and  directed 
their  operation  without  reference  to  their  ownership.  A 
few  weeks  later,  on  May  29,  Congress  directed  the  Inter 
state  Commerce  Commission  to  organize  a  Bureau  of  Car 
Service  with  power  to  regulate  the  use  of  rolling  stock  which 
included  about  2,300,000  freight-cars,  without  reference  to 
their  ownership;  while  the  legislation  of  August  legalized 
the  control  of  priorities  and  shipments. 

Through  the  summer  of  1917  the  Railroads' War  Board 
fought  against  the  difficulties  of  car  and  equipment  short 
age,  finance  and  labor.  The  unevenness  of  military  manu 
facture  brought  factories  into  full  production  before  facilities 
for  storage  at  the  ports  were  ready,  and  increasing  thousands 
of  loaded  cars  waiting  to  be  unloaded  made  the  confusion 
worse.  Toward  the  end  of  the  year  the  trainmen  presented 
demands  for  forty  per  cent  wage  increase  to  meet  the  rising 
costs  of  living,  and  the  railroad  owners  felt  that  private 
management  had  broken  down. 


5i8     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

On  December  26  President  Wilson  took  over  the  control 
of  the  railways  and  appointed  Secretary  of  the  Treasury 
Railroad  McAdoo  as  Director-General  of  the  United 
adminis-  States  Railroad  Administration,  in  control  of 

tration  .  .  .  .,  - 

2905  companies,  with  397,014  miles  of  track. 

At  the  beginning  of  1918  Congress  set  to  work  upon  the 
passage  of  an  act  to  regulate  the  compensation  to  the  rail 
roads  during  the  period  of  Government  control.  This 
became  a  law  March  21,  with  compensation  based  upon 
the  three-year  average,  1914-17.  The  Director-General  of 
Railroads  operated  them  as  a  single  system,  but  decentral 
ized  their  management  in  the  hands  of  regional  directors. 
The  ^operative  officers  of  the  roads  were  relieved  of  their 
duties,  but  were  in  many  instances  taken  into  Government 
service  with  different  assignments.  Competition  among  the 
roads  for  traffic  was  abolished,  consolidated  ticket  offices 
were  opened  in  the  various  large  cities,  needless  trains  and 
parlor  cars  were  dropped  from  the  schedules,  and  the  public 
was  urged  to  stay  at  home. 

Before  the  Railroad  Administration  had  time  to  show  its 
capacity,  the  month  of  January,  with  extreme  cold  weather 
Fuelless  and  heavy  snowfalls,  blocked  the  tracks  around 
days  the  Eastern  ports  and  froze  the  contents  of  the 

open  cars  into  solid  masses  of  ice  and  freight.  The  coal 
supply  of  the  cities  and  the  ordnance  plants  ran  low.  On 
January  17,  while  the  Railroad  Administration  was  main 
taining  an  embargo  on  freight  in  order  to  clear  its  lines,  the 
Fuel  Administrator  tightened  the  regulations  on  the  use 
of  bunker  coal  by  neutral  vessels  and  ordered  all  factories 
except  those  engaged  in  indispensable  war  operations  to 
shut  down  for  the  next  five  days,  and  thereafter  for  ten  suc 
cessive  Mondays.  "The  Garfield  fuel  order  was  a  call  of  all 
hands  to  the  lifeboats,"  said  the  Outlook;  while  injured  in 
dustry  complained  to  the  President.  Wilson  upheld  the 
Fuel  Administrator  with  the  grim  comment,  "We  are  on 
a  war  footing."  On  Tuesday,  January  22,  Colonel  Roose 
velt  arrived  in  Washington  with  the  slogan  on  his  lips,  "Tell 
the  truth  and  speed  up  the  war." 


CONSERVATION  519 

Congestion  and  despondency  in  the  United  States  coin 
cided  with  the  rumors  that  Germany  was  preparing  for  a 
final  drive  upon  the  western  front  to  force  a 
peace.  In  both  parties  there  were  critics  of  the  Chamber- 
war  measures  that  had  been  passed  and  the  way 
they  had  been  administered,  who  recited  in  Con 
gress  facts  that  they  had  gathered  from  the  factories  and 
the  cantonments  that  seemed  to  show  delay  and  failure. 
On  January  19  Senator  G.  E.  Chamberlain,  Democratic 
chairman  of  the  Committee  on  Military  Affairs,  attended 
a  luncheon  of  the  National  Security  League  in  New  York, 
and  there  "undertook  to  show  that  since  the  battle  of 
Bunker  Hill  we  had  never  had  a  proper  military  organiza 
tion  or  policy."  In  conclusion,  he  said  that  "the  military 
establishment  of  America  has  fallen  down.  There  is  no  use 
to  be  optimistic  about  a  thing  that  does  not  exist.  It  has 
almost  stopped  functioning  .  .  .  because  of  inefficiency  in 
every  bureau  and  in  every  department  of  the  government 
of  the  United  States." 

The  charge  of  Senator  Chamberlain  evoked  an  indignant 
and  point-blank  denial  from  the  President,  who  asserted 
that  it  was  "  an  astonishing  and  absolutely  unjustifiable  dis 
tortion  of  the  truth.  As  a  matter  of  fact,  the  War  Depart 
ment  has  performed  a  task  of  unparalleled  magnitude  and 
difficulty  with  extraordinary  promptness  and  efficiency. " 
A  few  days  later  Secretary  Baker  appeared  before  the  Com 
mittee  on  Military  Affairs  with  an  impressive  statement  of 
the  work  done  and  doing.  Senator  Chamberlain  introduced 
a  bill  for  the  creation  of  a  Munitions  Ministry,  which  re 
ceived  support  in  principle  from  Colonel  Roosevelt,  many 
of  the  preparedness  organizations,  and  many  members  in 
both  parties.  An  attempt  was  made  by  Senator  Stone  to 
show  that  the  demand  for  a  Munitions  Ministry  was  in 
effect  a  censure  of  the  President  inspired  by  partisan  poli 
tics.  The  President  announced  that  he  would  veto  any 
measure  that  attempted  to  take  from  him  or  lessen  his  re 
sponsibility  for  the  conduct  of  the  war. 

When  the  advocates  of  a  Munitions  Ministry  insisted 


5*0    RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

that  the  existing,  laws  on  military  coordination  were  inade- 
The  Over-  quate,  he  suggested  that,  if  they  desired  to  speed 
man  Act  Up  ^e  war,  they  should  give  him  power  to  re 
arrange  the  agencies  of  government  as  need  should  indi 
cate.  On  February  6  a  bill  was  introduced  in  the  Senate 
by  Overman,  of  North  Carolina,  giving  the  President  power 
for  the  period  of  the  war  to  create  new  agencies  of  govern 
ment,  and  to  alter  existing  ones  and  to  transfer  their  powers 
and  unexpended  appropriations  according  to  his  judgment 
and  the  need.  It  was  difficult  for  advocates  of  a  Munitions 
Ministry  to  oppose  the  Overman  Bill,  that  went  so  much 
further  in  the  direction  of  the  consolidation  of  sweeping 
powers  in  the  hands  of  the  President.  Chamberlain's  bill 
was  dropped,  and  on  May  20,  1918,  the  Overman  Bill  be 
came  a  law,  "to  coordinate  or  consolidate  executive  bu 
reaus,  agencies,  and  offices." 

For  the  remainder  of  the  war  President  Wilson  had 
dictatorial  powers,  limited  only  by  the  size  of  available 
appropriations  and  specific  prohibitions  fixed  by  law.  He 
exercised  his  new  powers  immediately.  An  Air  Service  was 
created,  taking  powers  away  from  the  Signal  Corps  and 
granting  them  to  a  new  Bureau  of  Aircraft  Production,  over 
which  John  D.  Ryan  became  civilian  chief.  A  Chemical 
Warfare  Service  was  added  to  the  army,  and  the  War  Indus 
tries  Board,  which  had  existed  thus  far  as  a  sub-committee 
of  the  Council  of  National  Defense,  and  which  had  wavered 
in  the  balance  as  Congress  debated  the  Munitions  Ministry 
that  might  supersede  it,  was  made  an  independent  agency  of 
the  Government.  Other  powers  of  less  consequence  were 
transferred  from  one  department  to  another. 

During  the  debate  on  the  Overman  Bill,  the  American 
equivalent  of  a  Munitions  Ministry  came  into  existence. 
A  "War  There  had  now  been  created  six  tremendous  new 
Cabinet"  war  agencies  that  were  familiarly  described  as 
the  "war  boards,"  the_Shipping  Board  undei^Jiurley.  the 
Food  Administration  under  Hoover,  the  Fuel  Administra 
tion  under  GarfielcL  the  War  Trade  Board 


mick,   the  Railroad  Administration  under  McAdoo.   and 


CONSERVATION  521 

finally  the  War  Industries  Board  under  Baruch.  who  took 
charge  on  March  4,  1018^.  Upon  the  afternoon  of  March  20 
the  President  called  into  conference  the  Secretary  of  the 
Navy  and  Benedict  Crowell  from  the  War  Department,  for 
Secretary  Baker  was  in  France,  and  the  six  heads  of  the 
war  boards.  Popularly  known  as  the  "war  cabinet,"  this 
body  held  weekly  meetings  until  the  end  of  the  war,  serving 
as  a  clearing-house  for  the  conservation  of  American  re 
sources  and  the  fulfillment  of  war  demands. 

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL  NOTE 

C.  R.  Van  Rise,  Conservation  and  Regulation  in  the  United  .States  during 
the  World  War  (1917),  was  designed  as  a  preliminary  study  to  a  larger 
work  whose  full  execution  was  prevented  by  his  untimely  death.  Two 
statements  upon  the  status  of  war  preparations  were  made  by  Secretary 
of  War  Baker  in  January,  1918,  and  may  be  found  in  the  Official  Bulletin, 
January  10,  29,  1918.  Benedict  Crowell,  America's  Munitions  (1919),  is 
a  well-illustrated  official  report  upon  the  mobilization  of  industry  for  pro 
curement  of  supplies.  The  materials  have  not  yet  been  assembled  for  a 
judicious  decision  upon  the  success  or  failure  of  war  preparation  after  the 
date  of  the  declaration. 


CHAPTER  LI  I 
WAR  AIMS 

THE  conduct  of  the  war  thus  far  was  investigated  by  the 
Senate  Committee  on  Military  Affairs  in  December  and 
Peace  over-  January;  and  just  as  the  interest  in  the  war  or- 
tures  of  ganization  was  approaching  its  height,  President 
Wilson  appeared  unexpectedly  before  Congress, 
on  January  8,  1918,  and  delivered  an  address  upon  the  aims 
of  the  war.  A  year  earlier,  on  January  22,  1917,  he  had  dis 
cussed  these  aims  in  the  last  weeks  of  American  neutrality, 
and  had  described  the  "peace  without  victory"  that  he  be 
lieved  the  United  States  willing  to  endorse.  In  the  ensuing 
twelve  months  the  United  States  went  to  war  convinced 
there  could  be  no  peace  without  the  destruction  of  the  Ger 
man  military  power.  ^  At  frequent  intervals  leaders  of  all 
countries  reverted  in  general  terms  to  their  war  aims,  but 
until  the  Russian  Revolutionary  Government  called  for  a 
formal  statement  of  these  in  the  interests  of  an  early  peace, 
no  compulsion  was  felt  to  define  the  terms  before  the  danger 
of  defeat  was  averted.  The  overtures  of  Pope  Benedict  XV 
for  peace  and  disarmament  in  August,  1917,  kept  the  dis 
cussion  alive,  while  President  Wilson's  reply  to  this  on 
August  27  showed  a  faith  in  the  German  people  as  distin 
guished  from  their  Government,  and  pointed  out  that  a 
peace  based  upon  reciprocal  condonation,  which  the  Pope 
requested,  would  contain  no  guarantee  against  another  un 
provoked  attack  by  a  nation  with  unfulfilled  military  am 
bitions.  The  overtures  of  the  Pope  were  without  avail,  as 
•  were  the  demands  of  the  Russian  revolutionists,  but  the 
informal  discussion  of  war  aims  did  not  subside. 

The  only  possible  program  that  President  Wilson  could 
The  see   he   Described   as   (i)    "open    covenants   of 

"Fourteen      peace  openly  arrived  at";  (2)  freedom  of   the 
seas;   (3)    equality  of  trade  conditions;  (4)  re 
duction  of  armaments;  (5)  adjustment  of  colonial  claims, 


WAR  AIMS  523 

giving  equal  weight  to  the  interests  of  the  populations 
concerned,  and  the  equitable  claims  of  their  Governments; 
(6)  evacuation  of  all  Russian  territory;  (7)  evacuation  and 
restoration  of  free  Belgium;  (8)  evacuation  and  restoration 
of  invaded  France  and  restoration  of  Alsace-Lorraine  to 
right  the  wrong  of  1871;  (9)  readjustment  of  Italian  fron 
tiers  along  lines  of  nationality;  (10)  autonomous  develop 
ment  for  Austro-Hungarian  peoples;  (n)  Balkan  recon 
struction  and  restoration  with  a  free  and  secure  access  to 
the  sea  for  Serbia;  (12)  freedom  of  the  Dardanelles  and  of 
foreign  nationalities  under  Turkish  rule;  (13)  independence 
for  the  indisputable  Polish  population,  with  access  to  the 
sea;  and  (14)  an  association  of  nations  to  afford  "mutual 
guarantee  of  political  independence  and  territorial  integrity 
to  great  and  small  states  alike."  Commenting  upon  these 
"fourteen  points,"  the  London  Spectator  remarked,  "it  may 
truly  be  said  now  that  the  minimum  terms  of  the  Allies 
have  been  stated." 

The  defection  of  Russia  from  the  Allies  because  of  her 
internal  collapse  and  her  Socialist  revolution  weakened  the 
opposition  to  Germany.  It  removed  one  great  set  of  armies 
from  the  field  and  aroused  aspirations  in  the  labor  classes 
of  all  Allied  countries.  Unless  these  could  be  shown  that 
the  World  War  was  essentially  a  struggle  for  democracy  in 
the  interests  of  the  common  people,  there  was  danger  that 
the  ability  towage  it  would  be  sapped  by  the  defection  of  the 
masses  of  the  Allied  peoples.  The  demand  of  the  Russian 
leaders  in  May,  1917,  for  peace  without  annexation  or  in 
demnities  was  accepted  in  words  by  a  resolution  in  the 
German  Reichstag  on  June  19,  and  thereafter  the  utterances 
of  the  extreme  Socialists  of  Germany  were  given  wide  pub 
licity  by  the  Imperial  Government,  and  German  funds  were 
made  available  for  the  use  of  the  revolutionary  Socialists  in 
Russia  who  spoke  the  same  political  language.  The  Rus 
sian  Constitutionalists  who  had  precipitated  the  revolution 
in  March  were  forced  out  in  July,  when  Kerensky  came 
into  power.  He  in  turn  was  attacked  by  the  Bolsheviki 
Party  that  admitted  no  national  allegiance,  accepted  finan- 


524    RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

cial  aid  from  Germany,  and  urged  a  program  of  complete 
social  revolution  and  of  proletarian*dictatorship,  and  that 
satisfied  the  demands  of  the  peasants  of  Russia  by  promis 
ing  a  division  of  the  crown  lands  and  commons  and  the 
great  estates. 

The  international  conference  of  Socialists  called  to  meet  at 
Stockholm  aroused  the  interests  of  anti-war  Socialists  in  all 
The  Stock-  countries,  and  received  the  enthusiastic  endorse- 
holm  Con-  ment  of  the  German  Socialists.  The  Allied  Gov 
ernments  denounced  it  as  German  propaganda, 
and  refused  to  permit  their  subjects  to  attend  it,  but  in  all 
the  Allied  countries  demands  arose  for  some  definite  state 
ment  of  war  aims,  and  for  guarantees  that  the  war  was  not 
a  menace  to  the  future  prosperity  of  the  working  classes. 

The  British  Labor  movement  led  in  the  formulation  of 
terms  of  peace  and  reconstruction.  As  in  other  countries 
British  there  was  in  England  an  anti-war  Socialist 

Labor  minority,    but    the    Labor    Party   was   already 

strongly  represented  in  Parliament,  and  its  rep 
resentatives  sat  in  the  war  cabinet.  "The  Labor  party," 
said  the  London  Nation,  "has  from  the  beginning  kept  the 
country  to  the  best  of  its  war  aims."  Its  leader,  Arthur 
Henderson,  broke  with  the  Government  on  the  treatment 
of  the  proposed  Stockholm  Conference,  but  the  Labor  Party 
continued  to  believe  in  the  war,  and  in  December  adopted 
a  memorandum  on  war  aims  that  commanded  attention 
from  political  leaders  everywhere. 

The  policies  embodied  in  the  "fourteen  points"  were  re 
ceived  with  remarkable  unanimity  in  the  United  States, 
The  Brest-  an^  were  approved  by  liberal  leaders  in  all  the 
Litovsk  Allied  countries.  The  London  Saturday  Review, 
speaking  the  voice  of  reaction,  complained:  "in 
stead  of  twaddling  about  democracy,  if  Messrs.  Wilson 
and  George  would  talk  the  only  universal  language,  viz. 
£,  5.,  d.,  the  Germans  would  respond  immediately."  The 
United  States  became  the  diplomatic  spokesman  for  the 
Allies,  and  the  danger  of  disunity  through  the  detachment 
of  Labor  from  its  support  to  the  Allies  was  avoided.  The 


WAR  AIMS  525 

success  of  the  Bolshevik!  in  the  November  revolution 
brought  Lenine  and  Trotsky  to  the  top  in  Russia  with  power 
to  carry  out  their  purpose  of  a  separate  peace.  In  the  nego 
tiations  at  Brest-Litovsk,  which  began  in  December,  the 
German  Socialists,  who  had  been  allowed  to  talk  about 
peace  aspirations,  were  conspicuously  absent,  while  the  mil 
itary  leaders  who  dictated  the  peace  substituted  for  the 
doctrine  of  no  annexations  a  new  view  of  voluntary  separa 
tion  under  which  Finland,  Lithuania,  Poland,  and  Ukrai- 
nia  were  separated  from  helpless  Russia.  The  insincerity  of 
the  German  overtures  was  clear  before  the  program  of  the 
"fourteen  points"  was  announced.  "The  year  1917,  with 
its  great  battles,"  as  an  Amsterdam  dispatch  quoted  the 
Kaiser,  "has  proved  the  German  people  has  in  the  Lord  of 
Creation  above  an  unconditional  and  avowed  ally  on  whom 
it  can  absolutely  rely." 

In  the  ensuing  weeks  the  war  aims  of  the  United  States 
received  the  approval  of  the  Allies.  Von  Hertling,  the 
German  Chancellor,  discussed  them.  Count  Czernin  ac 
cepted  them  in  general  so  far  as  Austria  was  concerned,  but 
the  Central  Powers  continued  to  give  a  more  reliable  inter 
pretation  of  their  practices  as  they  imposed  their  will  upon 
Russia  at  Brest-Litovsk.  The  United  States  had  declared 
war  upon  Austria-Hungary  on  December  7,  1917.  In  com 
menting  upon  the  Austrian  and  German  reactions  to  the 
"fourteen  points,"  President  Wilson  still  further  stressed 
the  hostility  of  the  Allies  to  the  German  Military  Gov 
ernment,  rather  than  to  the  German  or  Austro-Hungarian 
peoples,  and  held  out  hopes  to  both  of  these  that  a  revolt 
against  the  German  dictatorship  would  end  the  war  without 
their  destruction.  The  Allied  campaign  of  propaganda  in 
side  the  Central  Powers  against  the  German  Government 
was  carried  on  by  spies  sent  in,  by  advertising  in  the  papers 
of  neutral  countries  circulating  in  Germany,  and  by  the  dis 
tribution  on  the  western  front  from  balloons  and  aeroplanes 
of  tracts  and  pamphlets  that  described  the  war  aims  of 
the  Allies  and  the  autocratic  practices  of  the  masters  of 
Germany. 


526     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

The  war  failed  to  slacken  in  spite  of  the  discussion  of  the 
aims  of  peace.  The  German  response  in  the  field  was  a 
"Force  with-  renewal  of  large-scale  hostilities.  On  April  6,  as 
out  limit"  ne  opened  the  third  Liberty  Loan  drive  at  Bal 
timore,  the  President  closed  the  discussion  for  the  present. 
"Germany  has  once  more  said  that  force,  and  force  alone, 
shall  decide  whether  justice  and  peace  shall  reign  in  the 
affairs  of  men  .  .  .  there  is  therefore  but  one  response  possi 
ble  from  us:  Force,  force  to  the  utmost,  force  without  stint 
or  limit,  the  righteous  and  triumphant  force  which  shall 
make  right  the  law  of  the  world,  and  cast  every  selfish 
dominion  down  in  the  dust." 

The  expression  of  war  aims  in  which  the  United  States 
took  the  lead  was  possible  in  1918  because,  for  the  first  time 
since  the  war  broke  out  in  Europe,  the  Allies  had  brought 
into  existence  machinery  for  continuous  discussion  of  their 
policies.  The  leadership  of  the  United  States  was  pro 
nounced  in  the  creation  of  this  machinery. 

The  determination  of  Congress  in  April,  1917,  to  lend 
money  to  the  Allies  to  cover  their  supplies  bought  in  Amer- 
Allies  Pur-  lca  placed  new  responsibility  upon  the  Treas- 
chasing  ury  Department,  in  which  the  loans  were  made. 

A  few  hours  after  the  law  was  passed,  Great 
Britain  borrowed  two  hundred  million  dollars.  The  busi 
ness  continued  until  nearly  all  of  the  ten  billion  dollars  au 
thorized  had  been  thus  disposed  of.  An  immediate  conse 
quence  of  these  loans  was  greater  freedom  in  American 
purchases  for  all  the  borrowers  who  had  come  nearly  to  the 
limit  of  their  available  funds.  American  markets  "sky 
rocketed"  in  the  early  summer  of  1917,  as  the  numerous 
buying  agencies  of  the  United  States  Government  bid 
against  each  other  in  the  open  market  for  war  supplies,  and 
as  each  of  the  Allied  missions  added  to  the  competition  on 
their  own  account.  The  War  Industries  Board,  organized 
July  28  to  simplify  American  buying,  had  no  power  to  con 
trol  the  acts  of  the  Allied  buyers  who  were  in  the  market; 
but  since  the  Allied  buyers  were  spending  American  funds, 
it  was  possible  to  exert  pressure  from  other  sources,  with 


WAR  AIMS  527 

the  result  that  an  agreement  was  signed  in  August,  bring 
ing  into  existence  an  American  Purchasing  Commission  for 
the  Allies.  The  United  States  promised  that  prices  should 
be  the  same,  whether  for  Government  or  Allied  account 
or  for  private  consumption,  and  three  officials  of  the  War 
Industries  Board,  Baruch,  Brookings,  and  Lovett,  consti 
tuted  the  new  commission.  To  this  commission  the  Al 
lied  Governments  brought  their  requirements,  which  were 
placed,  like  the  American  requirements,  through  the  agen 
cies  of  the  War  Industries  Board. 

A  second  embarrassment  arising  from  the  policy  of  loans 
was  the  discrimination  necessary  to  be  made  in  placing 
them.  The  loans  were  by  law  available  for  all  inter_Aiiy 
countries  associated  in  the  war  against  Germany,  Finance 
and  all  these  in  turn  brought  their  demands  to 
the  Treasury  Department.  It  was  an  invidious  task  to  de 
cide  upon  the  relative  merits  of  the  demands  of  two  asso 
ciates,  and  in  the  absence  of  an  avowed  war  policy  there 
was  occasional  room  for  suspicion  that  the  aims  were  con 
tradictory  and  that  the  United  States  was  being  asked  to 
finance  both  sides  of  a  controversy.  This  w^as  particularly 
true  of  the  demands  from  the  eastern  Mediterranean  and 
the  Balkans.  Early  in  the  summer  the  suggestion  was  made 
that  an  Inter-Ally  Council  on  War  Purchases  and  Finance 
ought  to  be  created  to  pass  upon  the  merits  of  demands  for 
loans,  leaving  to  the  United  States  the  more  formal  duty  of 
meeting  the  requisitions.  Not  only  were  the  smaller  Allies 
somewhat  divergent  in  their  aims,  but  the  larger  Allies,  bor 
rowing  by  billions,  were  conducting  on  their  own  account 
in  Europe  independent  lending  campaigns  to  the  lesser  na 
tions.  The  loans  of  the  United  States  were  making  these 
lesser  sub-loans  possible,  and  gave  to  the  American  Govern 
ment  a  legitimate  interest  in  Allied  war  finance  that  was 
recognized  in  the  early  autumn  of  1917,  when  it  was  agreed 
to  hold  an  Inter-Allied  Conference  at  London  in  Novem 
ber  and  there  formally  organize  the  needed  financial  com 
mission  under  an  American  chairman.  The  leadership  of 
the  United  States  in  avowing  war  aims  was  warranted  by 


528     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

the  relative  detachment  of  the  United  States  from  selfish 
interest  in  the  details  of  the  outcome,  and  by  the  financial 
advances  that  were  making  the  continuance  of  the  war 
possible. 

In  September  it  was  announced  that  Colonel  E.  M. 
House,  of  Texas,  had  been  asked  by  the  President  to  begin 
Colonel  tne  assembling  of  data  to  be  used  by  the  Ameri- 

House's  can  commissioners  when  the  time  should  come 
to  talk  about  a  peace.  Colonel  House  had  been 
an  influential  adviser  of  President  Wilson  since  the  begin 
ning  of  his  Administration,  and  had  performed  functions 
that  might  reasonably  have  been  expected  of  the  State 
Department.  He  had  been  in  Europe  during  the  spring  of 
1914  visiting  with  royalty  as  a  distinguished  traveler,  ami 
returned  to  America  about  the  time  of  the  murder  of  the 
Archduke  Ferdinand.  In  the  spring  of  1915  he  was  sent 
abroad  as  confidential  agent  of  the  President,  and  visited 
the  various  belligerent  capitals,  but  the  chief  thing  that 
Americans  learned  from  his  visit  was  the  fact  that  he  would 
not  talk.  He  arrived  home  this  time  just  after  the  sinking 
of  the  Lusitania,  fresh  from  conferences  with  the  American 
ambassadors  and  European  statesmen.  At  the  end  of  the 
year  he  went  abroad  again,  and  spent  the  early  weeks  of 
1916  in  contact  with  the  European  Governments,  the  re 
sults  of  which  he  brought  back  to  the  White  House  in  the 
interval  between  the  resignation  of  Secretary  Garrison  and 
the  appointment  of  Secretary  Baker.  By  this  time  he  pos 
sessed  advantages  unique  among  diplomats  in  that  he  had 
had  intimate  intercourse  with  the  belligerent  statesmen  on 
both  sides  of  the  World  War.  His  frequent  appearance  at 
the  White  House  as  the  President's  guest  on  the  eve  of 
announcement  of  important  diplomatic  policies  gave  foun 
dation  to  the  growing  belief  that  the  President  relied  on  his 
advice.  His  selection  to  gather  materials  to  be  used  at  the 
Peace  Conference  involved  an  overlapping  with  the  func 
tions  of  the  State  Department,  but  was  natural  in  the  light 
of  his  wide  European  acquaintance.  The  work  of  the 
"House  inquiry"  was  organized  in  the  autumn  of  1917  with 


WAR  AIMS  529 

the  cooperation  of  historians  and  economists,  who  had  been 
in  the  service  of  the  Committee  on  Public  Information  and 
the  State  Department  since  early  in  the  war.  Before  they 
had  outlined  their  tasks  it  was  announced  that  Colonel 
House  would  shortly  proceed  to  Europe  at  the  head  of  the 
American  delegation  to  the  Inter-Allied  Conference. 

The  Inter-Allied  Conference  opened  in  Paris  November 
29,  1917,  with  the  United  States  represented  by  a  delega 
tion  that  included  the  Chief  of  Staff  of  the  army,  inter-Allied 
Bliss;  the  Chief  of  the  Naval  Operations,  Ben-  Conference 
son;  an  assistant  Secretary  of  the  Treasury,  Crosby;  a 
member  of  the  Shipping  Board,  Colby;  the  chairman  of 
the  War  Trade  Board,  McCormick;  a  delegate  of  the  Food 
Administration,  Taylor;  a  representative  of  the  Priorities 
Commission,  Perkins;  with  their  several  staffs.  Before 
opening  the  formal  sessions  in  Paris,  Colonel  House  and 
his  associates  spent  several  days  in  London  in  conference 
with  the  British  Government.  Here  on  November  18  Colo 
nel  House  made  public  his  instructions  from  the  President 
to  support  the  doctrine  of  unity  of  control  at  the  forth 
coming  Paris  Conference. 

The  American  experience  in  financing  the  Allied  cause 
and  starting  a  train  of  events  that  moved  toward  unity  of 
policy  was  reenforced  by  the  Austro-German  Supreme 
drive  that  plunged  down  the  Alps  into  the  plains  War  Coun- 
of  Lombardy  on  October  24,  1917.  Sweeping 
away  in  a  few  hours  all  of  the  gains  that  Italy  had  labori 
ously  put  together  in  two  years  of  war,  the  Central  Powers 
threatened  not  only  to  capture  Venice,  but  to  overrun  Italy 
as  they  had  overrun  Serbia  and  Roumania.  The  Ital 
ian  Government  called  for  aid  from  her  allies,  and  Lloyd 
George  and  Painleve  hastened  from  London  and  Paris  for 
an  immediate  conference  with  Orlando.  The  three  premiers 
met  on  November  6  in  conference  at  Rapallo  where  they 
agreed  that  a  Supreme  War  Council  should  be  erected  to 
sit  continuously  and  advise  the  Allied  Powers  on  their 
military  policy.  The  German  drive  was  checked  in  course 
of  time,  but  the  movement  that  it  started  joined  forces 


530     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

with  the  movement  originating  in  the  United  States.  In  a 
speech  at  Paris,  as  he  returned  from  Rapallo,  Lloyd  George 
talked  with  brutal  frankness  upon  the  failure  of  the  Allies  to 
coordinate  their  military  policy  and  explained  the  Supreme 
War  Council  which  was  to  consist  of  the  Prime  Minister 
and  one  of  his  associates  from  each  of  the  Great  Powers, 
and  to  meet  monthly  at  Versailles  in  conjunction  with  the 
permanent  military  staff  that  was  to  be  maintained  there. 

The  Bolshevist  victory  in  Russia  in  November  made  the 
need  for  Allied  cooperation  more  imperative  by  the  time  the 
Allied  Powers  met  for  their  Paris  conference.  Upon  motion 
of  the  American  delegation,  the  conference  divided  into 
separate  committees  upon  finance,  munitions,  ocean  ton 
nage,  and  food,  and  spent  its  time  not  upon  oratory,  but 
upon  a  comparison  of  the  several  national  programs.  The 
American  experts  gathered  the  information  needed  to  guide 
the  United  States  in  its  military  contribution  of  1918.  On 
December  i  the  Premiers  assembled  at  Versailles  for  the 
formal  opening  of  the  Supreme  War  Council,  and  a  few  days 
later  the  American  delegation  started  home. 

The  Inter-Ally  Council  on  War  Purchases  and  Finance 

began  its  work  at  London  in  the  middle  of  December  under 

the  presidency  of  Oscar  T.  Crosby.    Its  experi- 

Munitions,      ences  in  coordinating  the  demands  of  the  several 

and  Food        Allies  stimulated  an  inter-Allied  cooperation  in 

Councils  . 

other  fields  similar  to  the  unification  of  resources 
that  the  war  was  forcing  upon  every  country.  The  Allied 
Naval  Council,  agreed  upon  at  Paris,  went  into  continuous 
session  to  direct  the  blockade  of  the  Central  Powers.  In 
March,  1918,  the  Allied  Maritime  Transport  Council  began 
business  in  London  with  sub-sections  representing  the  mer 
chant  marine  of  England,  Italy,  France,  and  the  United 
States,  and  worked  for  a  better  utilization  of  ocean  tonnage. 
In  July  the  Munitions  Council  was  convened  in  Paris  with 
Edward  A.  Stettinius  present  as  the  American  represent 
ative,  and  the  various  food  controllers  came  together  in 
London  to  complete  the  pooling  of  food  resources  for  the 
use  of  the  Allies. 


WAR  AIMS  531 

The  unity  of  conduct  which  the  Allies  had  not  evolved 
before  the  end  of  1917  was  the  object  of  continuous  pressure 
from  the  United  States,  and  became  a  reality  as  the  great 
councils  built  up  their  organization  in  1918.  The  Supreme 
War  Council,  meanwhile,  was  developing  in  the  same  direc 
tion  under  the  influence  of  the  logic  of  events.  At  the  end  of 
January  the  Premiers  were  again  at  Versailles  for  a  renewal 
of  their  discussions.  France  and  Italy  were  now  asking  that 
the  Council  be  expanded  into  a  new  Inter-Allied  General 
Staff  with  one  general  in  command  of  all  the  armies.  In 
England  there  was  violent  attack  upon  Lloyd  George  be 
cause  of  his  Paris  speech  and  the  reluctance  of  the  British 
army  officials  to  subordinate  their  independence  of  com 
mand  to  any  foreign  commander.  The  fear  of  such  inter 
ference  brought  about  the  resignation  of  the  British  Chief 
of  Staff,  Sir  William  Robertson,  but  did  not  prevent  the 
steady  evolution  of  the  Supreme  War  Council  toward  a  real 
command.  The  Council  at  this  meeting  discussed  whether 
the  American  troops  should  be  used  as  a  unit  or  merged 
with  French  and  British  organizations.  However  they  were 
to  be  used,  General  Haig  believed  they  could  not  be  avail 
able  as  a  force  in  1918. 

The  Supreme  \Var  Council  met  again  in  March  when  the 
determination  of  Germany  for  a  peace  by  conquest  had 
been  fully  revealed.    While  the  discussion  of  the    Drive  of 
"fourteen  points"  had  sounded  as  though  peace    I9lS 
might  be  near,  preparations  were  being  completed  for  a  new 
drive  along  the  Somme  in  the  hope  of  breaking  through  the 
line  near  the  junction  point  of  the  British  and  the  French. 
The  new  drive,  put  in  motion  on  March  21,  1918,  com 
pleted  the  process  begun  in  November  at  Rapallo.    On  the 
26th,  at  the  village  of  Doullens,  a  little  north  of  Amiens 
on  the  endangered  front,  the  military  and  political  leaders 
signed  a  momentous  document  "to  coordinate  the  action 
of  the  Allied  armies  on  the  western  front,"  and    Foch  and 
placed  the  French  general  Ferdinand  Foch  in  a    supreme 
position  of  supreme  command.    A  few  hours  later 
General  Pershing,  with  four  divisions  ready  for  the  field, 


532     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

offered  them  all  to  the  new  commande/  to  be  used  as  needed. 
"If  we  must  have  one  commander,"  said  the  London  Na 
tion,  "and  we  still  doubt  the  necessity  or  suitability  from 
a  political  point  of  view,  we  could  have  no  one  better  than 
Foch." 

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL  NOTE 

A.  D.Howden  Smith,  The  Real  Colonel  House  (1918),  is  a  journalistic  work. 
The  utterances  of  President  Wilson  upon  the  basis  of  peace  are  in  news 
papers,  as  well  as  in  the  Congressional  Record  into  which  they  were  in 
variably  introduced  by  some  Congressman  within  a  day  or  two.  There 
has  not  been  any  adequate  historical  treatment  of  the  Supreme  War  Coun 
cil  or  the  inter-Allied  conferences,  although  there  is  much  scattered  material 
upon  them.  The  dissemination  of  the  American  point  of  view  was  en 
trusted  in  part  to  the  Division  of  Military  Intelligence  of  the  Army,  and 
in  part  to  the  Committee  on  Public  Information,  and  is  discussed  in  Heber 
Blankenhorn,  Adventures  in  Propaganda  (1919),  and  Vira  B.  Whitehouse, 
A  year  as  a  Government  Agent  (1920). 


CHAPTER  LIII 

WORK  OR  FIGHT 

THE  German  Friedensturm  was  designed  by  Ludendorff  to 
be  a  final  stroke  to  break  the  power  of  the  Allies  before  the 
promised  American  aid  should  come.  The  mag-  Battle  of 
nitude  of  American  preparations  indicated  that  I9lS 
it  might  soon  be  too  late  to  break  the  Allies,  and  the  sub 
marines,  on  which  reliance  had  been  placed  in  1917,  had 
failed  to  starve  England  or  to  crush  her  spirit.  On  March 
21  the  German  divisions  advanced  in  the  first  phase  of  the 
greatest  battle  in  history,  whose  active  front  extended  from 
Verdun  to  the  North  Sea,  and  which  lasted  in  its  succeeding 
phases  until  November  1 1 .  The  immediate  front  on  which 
the  activities  commenced  was  some  fifty  miles,  wide  across 
its  line  of  advance  from  the  vicinity  of  Cambrai  toward 
Amiens  and  the  estuary  of  the  Somme.  The  apparent  pur 
pose  was  to  split  the  English  and  French  armies,  crumple 
the  former  on  its  narrow  footing  along  the  Channel,  and 
then  sweep  to  the  left  for  an  attack  on  Paris.  The  blow 
struck  the  British  front  at  its  right  end,  and  on  the  days 
following  March  21  the  German  machine  pushed  back  all 
resistance  at  a  rate  of  from  five  to  seven  miles  a  day  until  at 
the  end  of  the  first  week  there  was  a  gap  at  the  point  of 
junction,  and  the  British  Fifth  Army  on  the  extreme  right 
was  stretched  to  the  breaking  point  if  not  beyond.  "  Where 
the  wave  struck  it  was  bound  to  wash  something  away," 
wrote  Sir  Arthur  Conan  Doyle.  That  the  wave  was  checked 
on  its  seventh  day,  and  that  Amiens  did  not  fall,  were  due 
to  that  law  of  diminishing  returns  that  affects  all  drives 
after  their  earliest  stages  and  to  the  gallantry  of  a  scratch 
division  composed  in  part  of  American  engineer  troops  and 
other  miscellaneous  units  not  directly  prepared  for  fight 
ing,  that  was  organized  in  the  very  face  of  the  advance 
and  that  not  only  resisted  it,  but  drove  it  back.  The 


534     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

installation  of  Foch  on  March  26  introduced  a  unifying 
element  into  the  resistance;  but  the  word  came  out  of 
France  to  America  to  hurry  up  the  preparations  before  it 
was  too  late. 

In  the  United  States  the  reorganization  of  the  war  ma 
chine  was  approaching  completion.  The  noisy  debate  over 
a  Munitions  Ministry  had  two  more  months  to  run,  but 
within  the  Government  noiseless  changes  were  being  made 
as  defects  were  realized.  The  last  great  elements  to  be 
brought  within  the  scheme  of  conservation,  labor  and 
finance,  occasioned  the  creation  of  new  machinery  in  April 
and  May. 

No  earlier  war  had  brought  into  such  sharp  prominence 
the  essential  importance  of  labor.  The  huge  armies  both 
Labor  in  reduced  the  man  power  of  the  nation  and  in- 
the  war  creased  the  demand  for  industrial  production. 

The  industries,  depleted  of  their  workmen,  even  after  all  the 
practicable  principles  of  selection  had  been  followed  in  the 
draft,  were  called  upon  for  a  larger  output  than  before  the 
war.  New  war  industries  more  than  made  up  for  the  aban 
donment  of  non-essential  ones.  In  the  United  States  the  la 
bor  market  was  additionally  depleted  by  the  disappearance 
of  immigrant  labor,  with  a  deficit  of  nearly  a  million  work 
men  a  year  since  1914.  In  every  country  it  had  required  a 
large  part  of  the  time  of  the  Government  to  see  to  it  that 
the  morale  of  labor  was  upheld,  and  to  make  the  continu 
ous  adjustments  of  wage  and  working  conditions  that  were 
made  unavoidable  by  the  rising  cost  of  living.  Early  in 
1917  the  American  Government  accepted  the  principle  that 
labor  standards  should  not  be  allowed  to  suffer  from  the 
war,  and  representatives  of  labor  agreed  to  settle  disputes 
where  possible  without  interruption  of  work.  Women  were 
introduced  into  factories  in  large  numbers,  and  the  scarcity 
of  skilled  labor  was  in  part  made  up  by  diluting  it  with 
unskilled  assistants  working  at  routine  tasks. 

The  importance  placed  upon  the  effectiveness  of  labor  was 
revealed  when  President  Wilson  in  November,  1917,  left 
Washington  to  address  the  annual  meeting  of  the  American 


WORK  OR  FIGHT  535 

Federation  at  Buffalo,  where  he  laid  before  the  representa 
tives  of  labor  the  same  body  of  doctrine  that  he        . 
later  elaborated  into  the  "  fourteen  points."  The    states  Em- 


black  weeks  that  ensued  from  the  Italian  col- 
lapse  to  the  opening  of  the  Somme  drive  (No 
vember,  191  7  -March,  1918)  inspired  new  efforts  toward 
the  conservation  of  labor  as  of  everything  else.  Congress 
appropriated  $250,000  for  the  Employment  Service  in  the 
Department  of  Labor,  and  to  this  the  President  added 
$825,000  from  his  special  fund.  The  Employment  Serv 
ice  was  reorganized  in  January,  1918,  and  extended  its 
network  of  offices  throughout  the  United  States  until,  on 
August  I,  by  executive  order  all  private  employment  agen 
cies  were  closed,  and  the  recruiting  and  placing  of  un 
skilled  labor  were  taken  over  by  the  National  Government. 
Nearly  as  many  men  were  placed  by  the  United  States 
Employment  Service  as  were  recruited  for  the  armies. 

The  other  services  of  the  Department  of  Labor  like  the 
Children's  Bureau  and  the  Woman  in  Industry  Service  were 
enlarged  in  1918,  and  in  May  the  housing  of  Government 
labor  became  one  of  the  functions  of  the  depart-  housins 
ment.  The  shortage  of  housing  accommodations  was 
brought  to  the  attention  of  the  Council  of  National  Defense 
and  investigated  by  one  of  its  committees  in  the  autumn  of 
1917.  The  new  munitions  factories  and  shipyard  plants 
were  calling  for  laborers  by  tens  of  thousands  in  regions 
where  there  were  no  houses,  and  contractors  were  unable  to 
fulfill  their  guarantees  because  their  workmen  had  no  place 
to  live.  The  Emergency  Fleet  Corporation  joined  the 
Council  of  National  Defense  in  demanding  provisions  for 
housing.  In  places  like  Hog  Island  and  Sparrow  Point  its 
program  could  not  move  until  its  men  were  housed.  The 
ordnance  plants,  like  those  near  Charlestown  in  West 
Virginia,  or  Hopewell,  or  Perry  ville,  were  in  the  same 
position.  In  March  Congress  made  an  appropriation  for 
shipyard  housing,  and  followed  it  with  another  in  May  to 
be  expended  by  the  Department  of  Labor.  Under  the 
latter  the  United  States  Housing  Corporation  was  organ- 


536     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

ized  in  July  on  the  principle  of  the  Government-owned  cor 
poration,  and  proceeded  to  manipulate  its  forces  of  archi 
tects  and  draftsmen  and  to  undertake  great  housing  proj 
ects  where  the  need  was  worst.  On  the  Plaza  in  front  of 
the  Union  Station  in  Washington  there  arose  a  group  of 
Government  hotels  to  house  the  young  women  drawn  to 
Washington  for  war  work  in  the  enlarged  departments  and 
war  boards,  for  whom  the  overflowing  homes  of  Washington 
offered  no  accommodation. 

A  conference  board  was  created  at  the  end  of  February, 
1918,  to  consider  a  permanent  war  basis  for  capital  and 
National  labor,  the  organized  unions  contributing  part  of 
War  Labor  its  members  and  the  employers  the  rest.  The 
joint  chairmen  of  this  board  were  ex-President 
Taft  and  Frank  P.  Walsh,  who  led  their  colleagues  in  a 
unanimous  report,  as  the  result  of  which  the  President  ap 
pointed  them  to  be  a  National  War  Labor  Board  on  April  8. 
This  board  was  to  be  a  supreme  court  for  labor  disputes, 
handling  none  until  all  local  resources  had  been  exhausted, 
but  then  to  be  called  in  to  make  a  final  judgment  while  the 
work  proceeded.  On  May  13  a  War  Labor  Policies  Board, 
with  Felix  Frankfurter  as  chairman,  was  appointed  to  repre 
sent  all  Government  departments  employing  labor,  to  elim 
inate  confusion  and  standardize  the  conditions  of  labor. 
When  Bridgeport  machinists  in  August  refused  to  accept 
the  judgment  of  the  National  War  Labor  Board,  the  Presi 
dent  focused  public  attention  upon  their  refusal  to  abide 
by  their  agreement  and  brought  them  back  to  work.  When 
the  Smith  and  Wesson  ordnance  plant  refused  to  recognize 
another  award,  he  commandeered  their  plant. 

The  organization  of  labor  was  nearly  completed  by  the 
1st  of  August,  with  the  doctrine  of  conservation  close  to 
"Worker  its  logical  extreme  as  expressed  in  the  principle 
fight"  Of  "Work  or  fight."  On  May  17  the  Provost 

Marshal-General  issued  a  new  ruling  under  the  Selective 
Service  Act  to  minimize  the  disturbance  in  industry  caused 
by  the  draft.  He  listed  occupations  in  the  order  of  their 
social  importance  and  ruled  that  loafers  and  idlers,  or  men 


WORK  OR  FIGHT  537 

engaged  in  useless  employments  or  non-productive  personal 
service,  should  not  be  entitled  to  deferred  classification 
on  grounds  of  dependency.  These  men  must  get  a  useful 
job  and  work  or  fight.  In  September  the  War  Industries 
Board,  now  thoroughly  reorganized,  emphasized  this  prin 
ciple  by  another  classification  of  industries  which  cut  off  the 
supplies  of  fuel,  steel,  transportation,  and  labor  from  in 
dustries  not  essential  to  the  winning  of  the  war. 

Bernard  M.  Baruch  became  chairman  of  the  War  Indus 
tries  Board,  succeeding  Daniel  Willard,  on  March  4,  1918, 
after  it  had  become  clear  that  Congress  would  not  Baruch  and 
pass  any  measure  similar  to  that  urged  by  Sen-  War  Indus- 
ator  Chamberlain.  "  Barney  Baruch  had  more 
power  during  the  war  than  any  other  man  in  the  world," 
wrote  the  chairman  of  the  committee  that  later  investi 
gated  his  work.  His  powers  as  chairman  were  based  upon 
a  sweeping  letter  from  the  President,  asking  him  to  "act 
as  the  general  eye  of  all  supply  departments  in  the  field  of 
industry."  His  reorganized  board  became,  in  the  wTords  of 
the  Chief  of  Staff,  "the  great  coordinating  factor  of  the 
government."  When  the  Overman  Bill  became  a  law,  the 
War  Industries  Board  was  made  independent  of  the  Council 
of  National  Defense  and  was  already  well  along  on  its  task 
of  industrial  correlation. 

The  organization  of  the  War  Industries  Board  was  never 
rigorously  defined.  It  was  kept  flexible  until  the  end  of  the 
war,  with  the  chairman  more  interested  in  re 
sults  than  in  organization  charts.  It  Was  SO  flex-  ments, 
ible  that  at  times  it  was  difficult  for  citizens  to 
find  out  with  which  departments  to  do  business. 
Its  most  fundamental  processes  were  brought  together  in 
the  Requirements  Division  that  was  formally  organized  to 
ward  the  end  of  March.  The  duty  of  the  Requirements 
Division  was  to  determine  the  priorities  in  which  materials 
were  to  be  delivered  for  Government  use.  Every  branch 
of  the  War  Government  was  called  upon  to  organize  its  own 
requirements  section  in  which  its  material  needs  should  be 
placed  on  a  schedule  week  by  week  as  far  in  advance  as  they 


538     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

could  be  conceived.  From  each  of  these  sections  an  agent 
was  sent  to  represent  that  interest*  in  the  Requirements 
Division,  over  which  Alexander  Legge  presided  as  the  agent 
of  Baruch.  The  army  and  navy  were  there,  the  Fleet  Cor 
poration  and  the  Railroad  Administration,  with  other  repre 
sentatives,  whose  information  and  judgment  were  needed  in 
order  to  determine,  from  the  assembled  list  of  all  the  require 
ments,  which  should  be  allowed  and  the  order  in  which  they 
should  be  satisfied. 

For  the  assistance  of  the  Requirements  Division  Judge 
Edwin  B.  Parker  was  appointed  Priorities  Commissioner, 
working  through  a  Priorities  Board,  for  the  special  study  of 
the  factors  determining  the  order  in  which  contracts  should 
be  delivered.  The  relative  supply  of  material,  facilities, 
fuel,  transportation,  labor  and  capital  was  taken  into  con 
sideration,  and  preference  list  number  i,  dated  April  6,  1918, 
began  a  series  of  classifications  culminating  in  the  more 
elaborate  lists  of  September. 

In  the  determination  of  the  various  problems  before  the 
Requirements  Division,  price  was  often  an  important  fac 
tor.  With  the  exception  of  food  prices,  which  were  already 
in  the  charge  of  the  Food  Administration,  the  duty  of  fixing 
prices  was  assigned  directly  by  the  President  to  Robert 
S.'Brookings  and  his  Price-Fixing  Committee.  This  body 
was  independent  of,  but  interlocked  with,  the  War  Indus 
tries  Board,  and  represented  all  the  other  war  boards  as  well 
as  the  Trade  and  Tariff  Commissions.  The  statistical  staff 
of  the  Federal  Trade  Commission  was  used  for  the  determi 
nation  of  production  costs,  while  prices  based  upon  these 
costs  were  adjusted  for  short  periods,  with  the  idea  of 
stabilizing  industry  and  securing  a  maximum  production. 

After  the  various  needs  of  the  United  States  and  the 
Allies  had  been  presented  in  the  Requirements  Division, 
and  had  run  the  gauntlet  of  the  Price-Fixing  and  Priorities 
Committees,  the  contracts  were  authorized  and  recorded 
in  the  Clearance  Committee  of  the  War  Industries  Board. 
In  many  cases  the  award  of  contracts  was  so  huge  as  to 
disarrange  the  normal  market.  A  Conservation  Division 


WORK  OR  FIGHT  539 

that  grew  out  of  the  earlier  commercial  economy  board  of 
the  Council  of  National  Defense  worked  with  the  commodi 
ties  sections  and  the  trades  concerned  to  get  a  fair  distribu 
tion  of  the  materials  left  after  meeting  the  war  demands. 
A  Resources  and  Conversion  Section  was  created  in  May, 
to  reorganize  the  industries  not  directly  engaged  in  a  war 
production  and  make  them  useful.  It  divided  the  United 
States  into  twenty  districts  where  regional  advisers  and 
local  war  resources  committees  applied  the  principles  of  the 
War  Industries  Board  to  local  affairs.  A  Facilities  Division 
created  in  August  brought  representatives  of  all  depart 
ments  of  Government  together  to  coordinate  their  work  in 
the  new  construction  needed  for  war  purposes,  while  a  Non- 
War  Construction  Section  formed  at  the  same  time  brought 
all  building  in  the  United  States  to  a  stop,  unless  definitely 
approved  by  the  War  Industries  Board. 

The  resources  of  the  United  States  were  strained  in  every 
direction  by  the  needs  of  war  The  demand  for  capital 
to  be  lent  directly  to  the  Government  in  the  War  Fi_ 
form  of  Liberty  bonds  was  matched  by  a  demand  nance  Cor- 
from  war  industry  for  its  commercial  credits. 
The  supply  of  available  capital  was  limited,  and  in  Janu 
ary,  1918,  voluntary  capital  issues  committees  were  formed 
in  each  of  the  federal  reserve  districts  to  do  in  the  field 
of  finance  what  the  conservation  and  priorities  divisions 
were  doing  for  industry.  The  capital  issues  committees  dis 
couraged  the  use  of  credit  for  purposes  not  connected  with 
the  war.  They  were  directly  legalized  by  an  act  of  Con 
gress  in  April,  which  at  the  same  time  authorized  the  Treas 
ury  Department  to  create  a  War  Finance  Corporation  with 
a  capital  stock  of  $500,000,000,  Government-owned,  with 
power  to  sell  bonds  in  order  to  raise  more  capital,  and  with 
authority  to  lend  these  funds  to  banks  to  cover  loans  made 
by  the  latter  for  the  benefit  of  war  industries. 

The  Government  grip,  tightening  on  industry  and  finance, 
was  tightened  on  trade  as  well.     Final  steps    pittman 
were  taken  in  February  to  bring  all  foreign  trade    Sllver  Act 
under  license  from  the  Wrar  Trade  Board,     The  Shipping 


540     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

Board,  in  conjunction  with  the  other  boards,  undertook  with 
new  seriousness  the  study  of  allocation  and  conservation 
of  tonnage,  and  of  essential  needs  for  imports  and  exports. 
Shipping  in  American  harbors  was  brought  under  the  auto 
cratic  control  of  their  Shipping  Control  Committee;  divi 
sions  of  planning  and  statistics  were  formed  to  look  into  the 
future  in  an  attempt  to  have  supplies  ready  when  the  de 
mand  for  them  should  come.  The  ancient  silver  question 
took  on  a  new  aspect  when  the  Oriental  demand  for  silver  bul 
lion  raised  the  price  until  it  neared  $1.2929  at  which  price 
it  would  resume  the  old  ratio  of  sixteen  to  one  to  gold.  The 
Pittman  Act  of  April  23,  1918,  authorized  the  replacement 
of  the  silver  dollars  and  certificates  by  federal  reserve  bank 
notes,  and  the  sale  of  the  silver  bullion  to  be  used  in  the  Far 
East  to  stiffen  the  exchange  rate.  When  the  price  of  silver 
a  little  later  arose  above  the  ratio  of  sixteen  to  one,  there 
was  little  silver  left  in  circulation  to  be  hoarded  because  of 
its  superior  value. 

The  development  of  the  war  machine  brought  great  new 
powers  into  the  hands  of  men  of  affairs.  Baruch  was  su 
preme  in  the  field  of  war  industries.  On  April  16  the  Presi 
dent  commandeered  the  services  of  Charles  M.  Schwab 
as  Director-General  of  the  Emergency  Fleet  Corporation. 
A  few  days  later  John  D.  Ryan  was  brought  into  the  War 
Department  to  reorganize  and  inspire  aircraft  production. 
George  W.  Goethals  at  the  same  time  became  the  chief 
reliance  of  the  War  Department  in  the  fields  of  purchase, 
storage,  and  traffic. 

A  reorganization  of  the  War  Department  and  of  the  Gen 
eral  Staff  had  been  continuous  throughout  the  war.  The 
selection  of  a  staff  for  Pershing  in  1917  left  the 
pertinent  Washington  offices,  already  undermanned,  with 
reorgani-  few  omcers  available  for  staff  service.  The 

zation 

absence  of  Major- General  Hugh  L.  Scott  on 
the  Russian  mission  deprived  the  Department  of  the  ad 
vice  of  a  Chief  of  Staff.  When  General  Scott  was  retired 
in  September,  his  understudy,  Major-General  Tasker  H. 
Bliss,  succeeded  him,  but  was  soon  sent  to  the  Paris  Con- 


WORK  OR  FIGHT  541 

ference  with  Colonel  House.     The  preparations  for  training 
and  outfitting  the  armies  and  the  performance  at  wholesale 
of  tasks  that  no  officer  in  the  regular  army  had  ever  been 
allowed  to  anticipate  led  to  continuous  error  and  improve 
ment.     While  the  advocates  of  a  Munitions  Ministry  were 
demanding  a  change  in  the  conduct  of  the  war,  the  War 
Department  itself  was  reorganizing  its  services  and  concen 
trating  in  single  offices  all  of  the  similar  services  hereto 
fore  exercised  independently  in  each  division  of  the  army. 
General  Goethals  became  Chief  of  a  Storage  and    Generaj 
Traffic  Service  in  December;  Edward  R.  Stetti-    Goethals, 
nius  was  made  Surveyor-General  of  Purchases    purchase,0 
in  January.     In  April  the  Division  of  Purchase,    5.t0ffige> and 
Storage,  and  Traffic  combined  these  two  estab 
lishments  under  Goethals,  and  brought  War  Department 
methods  into  harmony  with  those  of  the  \Var  Industries 
Board,  while  Stettinius  became  an  assistant  Secretary  of 
War;  specializing  in  matters  of  purchase  and  supply,  and 
was  sent  to  Paris  in  the  summer  to  represent  the  United 
States  on  the  Inter-Allied  Munitions  Council. 

The  internal  structure  of  the  General  Staff  was  reor 
ganized  in  February  and  again  in  August  with  increasingly 
sharper  definition  of  function.  On  March  4  Peyton  C. 
March,  after  European  experience  as  Chief  of  Artillery  with 
General  Pershing,  assumed  the  duties  of  Chief  of  Staff;  a 
few  weeks  later  he  was  elevated  to  the  rank  of  general.  In 
the  next  six  months  the  war  machine,  that  had  creaked 
and  rumbled*  through  its  year  of  construction,  gained  ever- 
increasing  momentum,  while  the  elevation  of  Foch  pro 
duced  the  unity  of  command  desired  by  the  United  States 
and  the  various  inter-Allied  councils  improved  the  coor 
dination  of  war  aims  and  practices. 

The  message  brought  back  by  Colonel  House  from  the 
Paris  Conference  called  for  an  increase  in  the  scale  of  Amer 
ican  preparations,  and  the  outbreak  of  the  Ger-    Eighteen  to 
man  drive  in  March  made  it  imperative  that    forty-five 
troops  be  sent  at  once.    "It  will  be  humanly  im 
possible  to  get  250,000  men  on  the  French  territory  within 


542     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

a  year"  was  the  regretful  opinion  of  the  Washington  Post 
in  July,  1917.  But  by  the  first  of  the  following  July  more 
than  four  times  that  number  had  sailed  for  France,  and  in 
the  two  months,  May  and  June,  more  than  half  a  million 
men  were  transported  across  the  Atlantic.  As  the  American 
divisions  one  by  one  left  their  cantonments,  "for  an  Atlan 
tic  port,"  their  places  were  taken  by  new  men  called  in 
under  the  draft,  while  new  plans  were  prepared  for  the  or 
ganization  of  the  whole  man  power  of  the  country.  Con 
gress  authorized  the  calling-out  of  troops  as  needed  without 
limit,  and  the  General  Staff  prepared  plans  to  have  eighty 
divisions  in  the  field  for  the  campaign  of  1919.  On  Au 
gust  31  a  Man  Power  Act  was  passed  extending  the  draft 
ages  to  include  the  years  eighteen  to  forty-five,  and  increas 
ing  the  total  number  of  military  registrants  to  24,234,021. 
The  nation  was  completing  its  organization  upon  the  ba 
sis  of  "work  or  fight"  as  the  battle  of  1918  entered  into  its 
second  phase  and  tested  the  mettle  of  the  Americans  in 
France. 

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL  NOTE 

The  technical  journals  of  political  economy  contain  numerous  articles 
on  war  regulation.  Among  them  may  be  mentioned  L.  H.  Haney,  "  Price 
Fixing  in  the  United  States  During  the  War,"  in  Political  Science  Quarterly 
(1919),  and  F.  W.  Taussig,  "Price-Fixing  as  Seen  by  a  Price-Fixer,"  in 
Quarterly  Journal  of  Economics  (1919).  The  Federal  Reserve  Bulletin  con 
tains  most  of  the  financial  documents,  as  well  as  news  and  comment.  The 
report  of  Judge  Hughes  upon  the  aircraft  situation  is  in  the  Official  Bulle 
tin,  November  6,  1918.  Data  for  many  judgments  upon  other  aspects  of 
the  military  program  may  be  found  in  the  numerous  volumes  of  Hearings 
before  the  Select  Committee  on  Expenditures  in  the  War  Department, 
(Washington,  1920). 


CHAPTER  LIV 
THE  AMERICANS  IN  FRANCE 

THE  training  program  of  the  A.E.F.  distributed  the  Ameri 
can  divisions  as  they  arrived  in  France  in  cantonments 
behind  the  line,  where  officers  and  men  were  put    Training 
through  courses  of  specialized  study  before  the    program  of 
components  of  each  division  were  brought  to 
gether  again  for  maneuver  as  a  unit.     After  this  course  of 
schooling  the  divisions  were  transferred  to  quiet  sectors  on 
the  western  front,  generally  between  Verdun  and  the  Swiss 
border,  and  there  relieved  French  divisions  and  received 
their  final  training  for  active  operations. 

Four  American  divisions  were  ready  for  the  active  front 
when  the  German  drive  began,  March  21,  1918,  and  were 
turned  over  to  Foch  to  be  used  where  needed.  The  1st 
and  2d  Divisions  were  built  up,  each  around  a  nucleus  of 
regular  army  troops;  the  26th  (Yankee)  Division  included 
the  National  Guard  of  New  England;  the  42d  (Rainbow) 
Division  represented  the  National  Guard  of  most  of  the 
States.  All  of  these  were  attached  to  the  British  or  French 
armies,  and  brought  into  action  in  the  early  spring,  while 
the  strident  call  went  out  to  America  to  hurry  up  more 
troops.  The  transport  service,  increased  by  British  vessels 
taken  away  from  their  task  of  carrying  food  to  England,  for 
defeat  was  wavering  in  the  balance  and  was  a  greater  men 
ace  than  starvation,  rushed  new  divisions  to  France.  In 
addition  to  the  four  divisions  ready  for  the  front  when  the 
drive  began,  there  were  four  more  in  the  training  areas; 
and  additional  divisions  arrived,  one  in  April,  nine  in  May, 
seven  in  June,  four  in  July,  six  in  August,  four  in  September, 
and  three  in  October,  until  in  the  end  there  were  forty-two 
divisions  on  the  soil  of  France.  In  addition  to  these  were 
special  troops,  not  attached  to  any  division,  that  swelled 
the  American  total  which  reached  1,000,000  in  July  and 


544     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

2,000,000  in  November.  Two  thirds  of  them  were  to  see 
active  service  in  the  front  line  before  the  armistice,  while 
twenty-nine  of  the  divisions  engaged  in  combat. 

The  quality  of  the  American  troops,  despised  by  Germany 
in  their  turn  as  "  Kitchener's  contemptibles"  had  been, 
Quality  of  was  a  ma^ter  of  uneasiness  in  the  Supreme  War 
American  Council.  The  American  army  was  composed  of 
physically  fit  young  men,  with  little  military 
training  before  the  war.  The  men  themselves  were  drawn 
directly  from  their  civil  occupations,  whether  they  entered 
the  service  through  the  regular  army,  the  National  Guard, 
or  the  draft.  Of  200,000  commissioned  officers,  who  trained 
them,  less  than  10,000  were  in  the  service  when  war  was 
declared;  of  this  five  per  cent,  upon  whose  training  and 
initiative  the  fate  of  the  army  depended,  only  5791  were 
professional  officers  in  the  regular  army,  and  more  than 
half  of  these  were  young  men  fresh  from  their  studies  at 
West  Point,  with  little  more  than  the  age  and  maturity  of 
a  college  senior.  There  were  not  over  3000  officers  of  rea 
sonable  maturity  to  assemble,  train,  and  operate  the  army, 
and  until  the  earliest  division  had  met  the  enemy  there  was 
a  question  as  to  the  success  of  the  American  experiment  in 
war.  The  Yankee  Division,  stationed  in  line  on  the  south 
side  of  the  Saint-Mihiel  salient  near  the  village  of  Seiche- 
prey,  took  part  in  the  first  engagement  that  could  be  called 
a  battle.  Its  trenches  were  raided  by  the  Germans  on 
April  20,  1918,  and  were  retaken  by  American  troops  on 
the  following  day. 

The  German  armies  retained  the  choice  of  time  and 
place  for  the  first  four  months  of  the  battle  of  1918.  Re- 
German  enforced  by  divisions  from  the  Russian  front, 
drives  LudendorfT  and  Hindenburg  used  all  their  re 

sources  to  force  a  victory.  The  first  phase  of  the  offensive, 
in  the  valley  of  the  Somme,  continued  for  two  weeks  after 
March  21  until  the  German  line  was  stabilized  near  Amiens 
and  Montdidier.  On  April  9  the  thrust  was  shifted  in  a  new 
direction,  this  time  in  the  valley  of  the  Lys,  from  the  direc 
tion  of  Lille  and  Armentieres  toward  the  shoulder  in  the 


The 
Battle  of  1918 


546    RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

British  line  at  Ypres  and  the  great  supply  stations  around 
Hazebrouck.  Here  again  the  line  swayed,  but  held.  On 
May  27  the  Germans  felt  for  a  third  time  for  a  soft  spot  on 
the  Allied  front,  and  this  time  struck  at  the  Chemin  des 
Dames,  north  of  the  Aisne  River,  between  the  towns  of 
Soissons  and  Rheims,  and  again  bent  the  Allied  line  and 
stretched  it  to  the  breaking  point. 

The  American  divisions,  brigaded  with  the  English  and 
French  armies,  and  growing  more  numerous  every  month, 
Staff  saw  a  routine  service  all  along  the  battered  front 

supervision  from  March  till  May.  To  the  1st  Division,  sta 
tioned  south  of  Amiens  near  Montdidier,  came  the  earliest 
opportunity  for  an  engagement  arranged  and  executed  by 
its  own  officers.  The  success  of  the  training  of  divisional 
staffs  was  as  much  a  question  as  that  of  the  field  effective 
ness  of  the  troops.  From  G.H.Q.  at  Chaumont  relentless 
supervision  was  maintained  over  officers  entrusted  with 
command.  Inspectors  with  the  black  braid  of  the  General 
Staff  descended  anywhere  at  any  moment.  The  giant  limou 
sine  with  four  stars  on  its  windshield  was  liable  to  appear 
with  General  Pershing  himself  without  warning,  and  the 
lack  of  officers  of  proved  experience  was  somewhat  made  up 
by  the  summary  removal  of  officers  of  whatever  rank  who 
appeared  to  waver  in  a  crisis.  The  returning  troop  trans 
ports  soon  began  to  bring  to  the  United  States  officers  from 
division  commanders  down,  for  whom  Pershing  had  no  use, 
while  the  officers  who  remained  on  duty  never  escaped  the 
spur  of  staff  pressure. 

On  May  28  the  1st  Division,   commanded  by  Hunter 

Liggett,  took  the  village  of  Cantigny,  near  Montdidier. 

With  neatness  and  dispatch  the  plan  of  opera- 

Cantigny  , 

tions  worked  out  to  a  complete  success,  and  the 
growing  suspicion  that  the  raw  material  of  the  American 
troops  was  good  enough  to  atone  for  under-preparation  was 
confirmed.  From  every  corner  of  the  front  there  came  de 
mands  to  Foch  for  more  of  the  American  divisions,  whose 
vigor  and  enthusiasm  wherever  they  appeared  brought 
stimulation  to  the  tired  divisions  on  the  French  and  Brit- 


THE  AMERICANS  IN  FRANCE  549 

ish  sectors.  War  was  an  old  story  to  troops  that  had  been 
in  it  through  four  campaigns,  and  needed  the  crusading 
spirit  of  the  American  divisions;  while  the  repute  the  1st 
Division  gained  at  Cantigny  came  just  in  time.  The  third 
phase  of  the  German  offensive,  beginning  the  day  before, 
swept  away  resistance  along  the  Chemin  des  Dames,  pushed 
across  the  Aisne,  and  then  the  Vesle,  and  drove  everything 
before  it  along  a  front  of  thirty  miles  or  more,  as  it  ad 
vanced  southward  between  Soissons  and  Rheims  toward 
the  Marne  at  Chateau-Thierry  and  the  road  to  Paris. 

From  the  first  hours  of  the  new  advance  the  critical  na 
ture  of  the  emergency  was  clear.  The  scene  itself  was  a 
surprise,  and  the  first  divisions  dislodged  by  the  chateau- 
Germans  on  the  Chemin  des  Dames  were  British  Thierry 
troops  who  had  been  sent  there  for  rest.  The  fortifications 
around  Rheims  could  not  be  reduced  by  the  invader,  but  those 
at  Soissons  yielded  a  little,  and  between  the  two  shoulders 
thus  created,  the  apex  of  the  salient  forced  itself  to  the 
south.  Every  available  American  division  was  brought  up 
by  motor  train  to  support  the  French.  On  the  afternoon  of 
the  fifth  day  of  the  advance.  May  31,  a  battalion  of  motor 
ized  machine-gunners  belonging  to  the  3d  American  Divi 
sion  came  up  from  the  south,  crossed  the  Marne  on  the 
bridge  at  Chateau-Thierry,  and  pushed  through  that  city 
to  its  northern  rim  against  the  stream  of  refugees  and  re 
treating  troops.  Here  it  took  its  station  and  helped  to  hold 
back  the  advance  of  German  troops  until  the  French  forces 
had  been  brought  across  the  Marne.  The  next  day  it  with 
drew  itself  to  the  southern  bank  and  stuck  there  until  the 
rest  of  the  3d  Division  came  up  behind  it,  and  the  2d  Divi 
sion  took  station  on  its  left.  "The  American  gunners," 
wrote  a  French  correspondent  who  saw  them  there,  "are 
handsome  chaps,  with  long,  muscular  legs  and  supple  move 
ments,  in  whom  a  certain  seeming  nonchalance  follows  con 
cise  action  which  goes  directly  to  the  point." 

The  German  tide  slacked  at  Chateau-Thierry  with  a  raw 
American  division  standing  between  it  and  Paris.  The 
2d  Division,  under  Bundy,  instead  of  going  into  training 


RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

camp  was  sent  to  position  along  the  Paris- Vaux  road, 
where  its  first  units  came  to  rest  on  June  i.  There  was  no 
line  left  to  be  taken  over.  Between  their  outposts  and  the 
advancing  Germans  there  was  nothing  but  a  procession  of 
French  troops  in  full  retreat.  By  Sunday  morning,  June  2, 
parts  of  the  2d  Division,  including  a  brigade  of  marines,  had 
chosen  their  own  line  and  were  dug  in.  Late  that  afternoon 
the  German  columns  in  full  pursuit  were  broken  by  Ameri 
can  fire  at  Hill  165.  Four  days  later  the  2d  Division  took 
the  offensive  to  clean  the  German  machine-gunners  out  of 
the  hill  pockets  and  brush  concealments  of  Belleau  Wood. 
In  the  next  four  weeks  the  margins  of  the  Marne  salient 
were  consolidated  as  Foch  awaited  a  renewal  of  the  German 
drive. 

At  daybreak  on  July  15  the  German  offensive  opened 
up  once  more  upon  a  long  front  from  Chateau-Thierry  to 
The  second  Rheims  and  beyond  Rheims  to  the  edge  of  the 
Marne  forest  of  the  Argonne.  The  strategic  situation 

of  Rheims  and  the  importance  of  the  railway 
lines  behind  it  made  it  important  to  remove  this  obstruction 
at  once.  There  were  now  new  American  divisions  awaiting 
behind  the  line,  but  the  3d  Division  at  the  extreme  left  of 
the  assailed  area  held  its  own  at  Chateau-Thierry,  under 
General  Dickman,  when  the  Germans  advanced  again. 
Eight  divisions  in  all  played  their  part  in  this  engage 
ment: —  the  1st,  2d,  3d,  and  4th,  26th,  28th  (Iron  Division, 
of  Pennsylvania  troops),  93d  (colored),  and  the  42d. 

The  German  General  Staff  knew  in  its  heart  that  this 
was  its  last  offensive.  Following  the  defensive  scheme  of 
Foch'scoun-  Petain,  Foch  yielded  a  little  to  take  up  the  shock 
ter-attack  of  ft[e  impact,  and  on  July  18  countered  with 
his  left  between  Soissons  and  the  Marne.  The  German  suc 
cess  had  thrust  a  sharp  salient  with  three  sides  exposed 
south  of  the  Aisne.  Foch,  who  had  devoted  the  first  weeks 
of  his  supreme  command  to  taking  an  inventory  of  his 
strength  and  to  meeting  immediate  emergencies  as  they 
appeared,  was  watching  for  his  opportunity  to  endanger 
the  salient  by  striking  near  its  base,  and  to  take  the  aggres- 


THE  AMERICANS  IN  FRANCE  549 

sive  into  his  own  hands.  His  twenty- five- mile  front  ex 
tended  from  Belleau  Wood  to  the  Aisne  below  Soissons. 
The  1st  and  2d  Divisions  operated  near  his  left,  the  4th  and 
26th  were  stationed  near  his  right.  As  the  counter-attack 
was  developed  into  an  Allied  offensive,  the  3d  Division 
was  brought  in,  then  the  42d  and  the  32d  (Wisconsin  and 
Michigan  National  Guard).  The  counter-attack  was  suc 
cessful  beyond  expectation.  For  a  few  days  it  looked  as 
though  the  whole  German  army  might  be  caught  in  the 
pocket  it  had  itself  created  This  hope  was  not  realized,  but 
on  August  4  Fismes,  on  the  Vesle,  was  occupied  and  the 
Marne  pocket  was  entirely  gone.  From  the  Vesle  to  the 
Aisne  the  line  pushed  on  through  August.  On  October  4  a 
German  shell  hit  the  dismantled  cathedral  at  Rheims  for 
the  last  time,  and  Foch  had  brought  additional  pressure  to 
bear  at  five  other  points. 

On  August  8,  following  the  elimination  of  the  Marne 
salient,  Haig  was  allowed  to  advance  in  the  third  battle  of 
the  Somme.  With  Amiens  in  his  rear  and  with  Allied 
the  front  between  Albert  and  Montdidier  im-  offensives 
mediately  before  him,  he  gained  seven  miles  at  once  on  a 
twenty -five-mile  front  and  pushed  on  in  a  war  of  movement 
after  long  and  tedious  months  of  defensive  actions.  The 
27th  and  33d  Divisions  of  Americans  operated  with  him. 
By  the  i8th  of  August  this  salient  had  gone  like  that  at 
Chateau -Thierry.  On  August  18  and  19  two  more  thrusts 
were  made  against  the  German  line,  one  at  the  junction  of 
the  Aisne  and  Oise  against  what  was  now  a  German  salient 
after  the  elimination  of  the  Marne  and  Picardy  pockets. 
With  Mangin  in  charge,  Noyon  and  La  Fere  became  the  ob 
jectives,  and  on  its  seventh  day  the  German  forces  began  a 
strategic  retreat  upon  the  Oise,  while  on  August  30  the  32d 
Division  at  Juvigny,  after  fighting,  as  Petain  cited  it,  "for 
three  days  without  stopping,  without  rest,  and  almost  with 
out  food,"  gained  control  of  the  western  approaches  to 
the  Chemin  des  Dames.  Simultaneously  on  August  19  the 
British  in  Flanders  renewed  their  operations  on  the  extreme 
German  right, 


550     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

The  Allied  crisis  from  March  until  July  delayed  the  final 
steps  in  the  organization  of  the  A.E!F.  as  a  separate  force, 
First  Amer-  but  gave  to  the  early  divisions  brigaded  with 
ican  Army  ^  Engiish  ancj  the  French  intimate  experience, 
first  with  defensive  fighting,  then  with  offensive.  The  Allied 
divisions  had  of  necessity  become  past-masters  of  defense. 
The  American  troops  were  indoctrinated  with  the  idea  of 
an  offensive  campaign,  and  in  their  training  camps  continu 
ous  bayonet  drill  kept  them  alive  to  their  special  mission. 
Early  in  August,  as  the  divisions  could  be  released  from 
their  services  elsewhere,  they  were  transferred  to  the  im 
mediate  command  of  General  Pershing,  and  were  organized 
in  the  First  American  Field  Army,  which  remained  for  the 
time  being  under  the  immediate  direction  of  the  command- 
er-in-chief.  There  were  eighteen  divisions  in  the  three 
army  corps  of  the  First  Army.  The  selective  process  and 
field  experience  of  the  colonels  and  brigadier-generals  of  the 
old  regular  army  were  the  basis  for  the  selection  of  the  di 
vision  commanders,  and  from  these  in  turn  were  selected 
the  commanders  for  each  army  corps.  The  1st  Corps  under 
Hunter  Liggett  was  partially  organized  before  the  1st  of 
June,  and  fought  under  his  command  at  Chateau-Thierry, 
and  in  due  time  Liggett  wras  elevated  to  the  command  of 
the  First  Field  Army.  The  announcement  of  the  creation  of 
this  army  was  followed  by  so  suspicious  a  silence  upon  the 
doings  of  the  American  divisions  as  to  arouse  surmises  that 
larger  operations  were  in  view.  Each  day  brought  to  Foch 
greater  freedom  for  the  selection  of  his  field  of  operations. 
With  armies  operating  continuously  along  the  Aisne,  the 
Oise,  the  Somme,  and  the  Lys,  the  German  salients  created 
in  the  first  phase  of  the  battle  of  1918  yielded  to  Foch  in 
the  second  phase  that  began  July  18,  and  had  disappeared 
early  in  September. 

The  long  curve  of  the  western  front  from  Ostend  on  the 
Channel  to  the  Swiss  border  was  in  September  broken  only 
Saint-  by  the  sharp  hook  lying  southeast  of  Verdun 

Mihiel  and  known  as  the  Saint-Mihiel  salient.  As  the 

German  armies  advanced  upon  Belgium  and  France  in 


THE  AMERICANS  IN  FRANCE  551 

1914,  Verdun  had  held,  although  the  line  beyond  it  swung 
far  west  to  the  Marne.  Verdun  continued  to  hold  when 
the  Crown  Prince  drove  against  it  in  1916.  Flanked  by  the 
Saint-Mihiel  salient  it  continued  to  be  the  defense  of  France, 
and  the  salient  itself  had  been  fortified  by  Germany  for 
permanent  occupation.  Here  were  great  memorial  ceme 
teries  to  the  German  dead,  with  granite  tombs  and  concrete 
decorations,  which  gave  every  evidence  of  having  been  con 
structed  to  remain  German  forever  as  a  Denkmal  for  future 
generations. 

The  Saint-Mihiel  salient  lay  directly  in  front  of  the  sector 
chosen  for  American  operations,  and  was  selected  to  test 
the  capacity  of  the  First  Field  Army.  On  September  12, 
in  cooperation  with  the  French,  but  with  plans  of  his  own 
making,  Pershing  reduced  the  salient.  In  two  days'  fight 
ing,  directed  simultaneously  on  both  flanks  of  the  salient, 
the  obstruction  of  four  years'  standing  was  removed,  the 
whole  Allied  front  was  smooth,  and  directly  before  the 
American  forces  lay  the  city  of  Metz  and  the  coal-fields  of 
the  Briey  district.  Twelve  thousand  German  prisoners  were 
reported  on  the  first  day,  while  a  German  retreat,  slow  but 
stubborn,  was  soon  in  motion  along  the  whole  front. 

The  American  success  at  Saint-Mihiel  revealed  both  the 
capacity  of  the  American  troops  and  the  strategic  strength 
of  Foch.  Before  the  week  was  over  an  Allied  drive  was 
begun  in  the  valley  of  the  Vardar  above  Saloniki  on  the 
Bulgarian  front.  In  three  days  more  Allenby  in  Palestine 
broke  up  the  Turkish  armies  between  the  Jordan  and  the 
sea,  and  took  the  town  of  Nazareth,  eliminating  Turkey 
from  the  war.  A  little  later,  on  October  24,  on  the  anni 
versary  of  the  Austro-German  drive,  Italy  wras  let  loose 
upon  her  Austrian  front,  and  Austria  made  haste  to  ask  for 
terms  of  peace. 

While  Foch  was  clearing  the  Germans  from  the  pocket  on 
the  Marne,  the  United  States  prepared  its  eighty-division 
program  for  1919  and  increased  the  limits  of  the  draft. 
New  divisions  were  organized,  and  the  War  Industries  Board 
made  ready  to  take  even  more  complete  control  of  the  ma- 


552     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

chinery  of  economic  life.  The  successes  of  Foch  brought  a 
new  possibility  to  the  attention  of  the  Supreme  War  Coun 
cil.  The  second  million  of  American  troops  was  on  its  road 
to  France,  the  advance  divisions  had  shown  their  mettle, 
and  there  now  appeared  a  chance,  with  the  German  armies 
all  in  retreat,  to  end  the  war  in  1918.  The  British  kept  up 
their  pressure  in  front  of  Ypres,  and  with  the  French  pushed 
toward  Cambrai  and  Saint-Quentin.  The  American  forces 
after  Saint-Mihiel  were  shifted  west  of  the  Meuse  between 
Verdun  and  the  Argonne  Forest,  and  there  in  conjunction 
with  French  forces  between  the  Argonne  and  Rheims  were 
headed  down  the  Meuse  toward  the  city  of  Sedan. 

On  September  26  the  battle  of  the  Meuse-Argonne 
began,  the  third  phase  of  the  battle  of  1918,  with  nine 
Meuse-  American  divisions  participating  in  the  first  ad- 
Argonne  vance.  The  territory  in  front  of  them  was  not 
surpassed  by  any  on  the  active  front  in  its  adap 
tability  for  defense.  Crowded  with  ravines  and  hills  and 
river  valleys,  obscured  by  forests  and  dense  undergrowth, 
and  almost  without  roads,  there  was  no  terrain  more  diffi 
cult  to  take  by  force.  Only  two  of  the  nine  divisions  had 
seen  heavy  fighting  before  they  were  plunged  into  this  new 
battle.  The  veteran  divisions  had  all  been  used  at  Saint- 
Mihiel  and  were  not  reorganized  for  operations  until  the 
Argonne  was  in  its  second  phase,  but  before  the  forty- 
seven  days  of  continuous  fighting  were  over  twenty-one 
divisions  had  been  used. 

Bulgaria  quit  the  war  on  September  30,'  the  fifth  day  of 
the  Argonne  drive,  and  surrendered  unconditionally.  On 
Central  October  5  the  German  Government  officially 

Powers  asked  for  terms  of  peace,  and  with  Austria 

avowed  a  devotion  to  the  "fourteen  points" 
that  had  been  spurned  in  January.  The  overtures  were 
made  through  the  United  States,  and  were  met  by  the  sharp 
inquiry:  For  whom  do  you  pretend  to  speak,  the  German 
peoples  or  their  rulers?  The  correspondence  thus  begun 
continued  through  October,  with  German  armies  yielding 
as  slowly  as  they  could,  and  with  German  diplomats  strug- 


THE  AMERICANS  IN  FRANCE  553 

gling  to  hurry  an  armistice  before  complete  collapse.  The 
drive  of  Foch,  from  being  a  series  of  related  attacks,  be 
came  a  great  strategic  movement  threatening  on  its  left  the 
German  forces  in  Belgium  and  northern  France,  and  on  its 
right  the  great  railway  system  upon  which  the  whole  Ger 
man  front  depended.  With  their  backs  against  the  forest 
of  the  Ardennes,  and  the  Belgian  highlands,  the  German 
forces  foresaw  complete  destruction  when  Sedan  should  fall. 
The  various  Allied  columns  pressed  upon  the  German  rear 
in  the  hope  of  forcing  a  collapse,  and  toward  the  end  of 
October  the  United  States  transmitted  the  appeal  for  peace 
to  the  Supreme  War  Council. 

On  October  31,  when  the  Supreme  War  Council  formally 
assembled  to  consider  the  terms  of  the  armistice  to  be 
granted  to  Germany,  Turkey  was  in  the  act  of  German 
signing  an  unconditional  surrender  in  the  field  armistlce 
and  Austria  was  in  negotiation  for  one  that  was  signed 
November  3.  In  the  correspondence  preceding  the  meet 
ing  it  was  brought  out  that  there  could  be  no  cessation  of 
hostilities  until  the  Supreme  War  Council  was  satisfied  in  a 
military  way  that  Germany  had  been  deprived  of  power  to 
resume  the  war.  The  Supreme  War  Council  debated  the 
terms  of  German  disarmament,  and  on  November  5  the 
United  States  transmitted  their  reply  to  Germany.  They 
were  ready  to  make  peace  upon  the  basis  of  the  "fourteen 
points,"  except  as  to  the  freedom  of  the  seas,  upon  which 
they  reserved  to  themselves  complete  freedom,  and  the 
evacuation  and  restoration  of  invaded  territory,  as  to  which 
"they  understand  that  compensation  will  be  made  by  Ger 
many  for  all  damage  done  to  the  civilian  population  of  the 
Allies  and  their  property  by  the  aggression  of  Germany  by 
land,  by  sea,  and  from  the  air."  The  German  Govern 
ment  was  informed  that  Marshal  Foch  would  receive  their 
representatives  and  communicate  the  military  terms  of  the 
armistice. 

The  war  was  over;C^Knany  was  in  open  revolution; 
William  II  abdicated  on  November  9;  and  on  November  u 
the  German  envoys  signed  an  armistice  that  was  in  sub- 


554     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

stance  an  almost  unconditional  surrender.  They  began  at 
once  the  withdrawal  of  their  troops*  from  the  invaded  area, 
while  a  few  days  later  the  army  of  occupation  followed  them 
to  the  Rhine  and  took  station  at  Cologne,  Coblenz,  and 
Mainz.  The  American  forces,  which  the  armistice  had 
found  along  the  Meuse  above  Sedan,  marched  down  the 
Moselle  to  headquarters  at  Coblenz. 

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL  NOTE 

General  Pershing's  summary  of  operations  in  his  Final  Report  (1919), 
may  be  supplemented  by  the  semi-official  Frederick  Palmer,  America  in 
France  (1918),  and  Our  Greatest  Battle  (1919).  Jennings  C.  Wise,  The 
Turn  of  the  Tide  (1920),  and  R.  M.  Johnston,  First  Reflections  on  the  Cam 
paign  of  igi8  (1919),  are  special  in  their  treatment.  The  final  operations 
are  covered  in  the  second  volume  of  John  Bach  McM aster,  The  United 
States  in  the  World  War  (1920).  Other  works  of  interest,  in  the  absence 
of  definitive  studies,  are  A.  VV  Page,  The  Truth  About  Our  no  Days 
Fighting  (1919);  de  Chambrun  and  de  Marenches,  The  American  Army  in 
the  European  Conflict  (1919),  and  Erich  von  Ludendorff,  Ludendorff's 
Own  Story,  August  1914- November  iQi8  (1919). 


CHAPTER  LV 

PEACE  AND  THE  LEAGUE  OF  NATIONS 

THE  closing  weeks  of  the  battle  of  1918  brought  peace  to 
Europe  and  relieved  the  tension  of  the  world.      Between 
September  15,  when  Austria  made  her  open  ap-    congres_ 
peal  for  a  cessation  of  hostilities,  and  Novem-    sional  eleo 

.     .  .  ,      ,         tion  of  1918 

ber  1 1 ,  when  the  armistice  terms  were  signed,  the 
alliance  of  the  Central  Powers  fell  apart.  Bulgaria  and 
Turkey  capitulated,  the  Dual  Monarchy  disintegrated  and 
collapsed,  and  the  military  rulers  of  Germany  were  deposed. 
The  fear  of  possible  defeat  disappeared  from  the  mind  of  the 
Allies,  and  in  its  place  arose  inconsistent  hopes  of  recouping 
the  losses  of  the  war,  of  strengthening  national  defenses 
against  the  next  war,  of  punishing  Germany,  and  of  realiz 
ing  those  ideals  whose  clear  enunciation  by  President  Wilson 
held  the  associates  together  during  the  final  year  of  war. 
Whether  conservative  or  radical,  the  citizens  of  the  victor 
nations  ceased  to  fear  and  turned  to  the  future.  The  fact 
that  they  were  free  to  do  so  was  the  most  important  feature 
of  the  Congressional  campaign  then  in  progress  in  the  United 
States. 

Only  in  the  United  States  had  the  Government  in  power 
at  the  outbreak  of  the  war  survived  the  upheavals  of  opin 
ion  and  the  shifting  fates  and  remained  in  office  until  the 
armistice.  In  England,  France,  and  Italy  there  had  ap 
peared  war  coalition  Governments.  Lloyd  George,  Clemen- 
ceau,  and  Orlando,  their  premiers,  were  in  office  with  a 
backing  of  sagacious  and  practical  politicians,  whose  accept 
ance  of  the  "fourteen  points"  and  the  political  liberalism 
that  these  embodied  was  less  a  matter  of  conviction  than 
of  expediency.  In  America  the  author  of  this  formula  re 
mained  in  power  because  of  the  constitutional  provision  for 
a  four-year  term,  and  no  war  issue  could  have  driven  him 
out  because  America  has  no  responsible  government  in  the 


556     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

European  sense.  Critics  of  his  Administration  and  partisan 
opponents  of  his  party  were  forced  during  the  war  to  re 
frain  their  active  political  opposition,  for  this  could  have 
no  effect  but  to  hinder  the  prosecution  of  war  measures  and 
perhaps  wound  the  obstructionists  on  the  rebound.  "  Poli 
tics  is  adjourned,"  the  President  himself  declared.  Public 
opinion  treated  alike  Republicans  and  Democrats  believed 
to  be  obstructive  of  the  war.  With  national  defense  holding 
the  whole  of  the  mind  of  the  nation,  the  parties  had  pre 
pared  to  elect  a  Congress  in  1918  The  Republican  minor 
ity  found  itself  bound  hand  and  foot  by  the  necessities  of 
patriotic  unity. 

The  reorganization  of  the  Republican  Party  after  the 
defeats  of  1910,  1912,  1914,  and  1916  was  accomplished  in 
Republican  February,  1918,  when  Will  H.  Hays,  of  Indiana, 
Party  re-  was  made  chairman  of  the  National  Committee. 
Hays  was  already  favorably  known  as  a  healer  of 
factional  differences,  and  replaced  a  chairman  whose  war 
record  was  poor,  in  order  to  bring  into  solid  front  all  the 
factions  whose  controversy  since  1912  disrupted  the  party. 
The  only  basis  of  attack  open  to  Republicans  was  to  charge 
the  Administration  with  inefficiency  and  lukewarm  pros 
ecution  of  the  war.  The  Munitions  Ministry  debate 
received  most  of  its  support  from  Republican  leaders. 
Defects  in  war  preparation  were  charged  against  the  Gov 
ernment,  and  Democratic  opponents  of  the  war  were  pic 
tured  as  the  real  Democrats.  But  the  assignment  of  Judge 
Hughes  to  investigate  the  aircraft  scandal  and  the  appoint 
ment  of  ex-President  Taft  as  chairman  of  the  National  War 
Labor  Board  broke  the  force  of  these  attacks.  To  offset 
Roosevelt  and  Wood,  who  were  set  aside,  the  friends  of 
the  Administration  could  point  to  the  important  duties 
of  Pershing,  Sims,  March,  and  Hoover,  all  of  whom  were 
Republicans.  The  canvass  of  1918  was  unimportant  until 
in  October  the  beginning  of  the  discussion  of  the  armistice 
made  it  clear  that  the  danger  had  passed.  Immediately  the 
demand  for  "unconditional  surrender"  was  raised  by  Re 
publicans,  the  Administration  was  charged  with  an  inten- 


PEACE  AND  THE  LEAGUE  OF  NATIONS        557 

tion  to  accept  a  peace  of  negotiation,  and  the  interna 
tional  tendency  of  the  ''fourteen  points"  was    «Uncon_ 
denounced.     Lodge  and   Poindexter  led  in  the    ditional 
attack,  and  Roosevelt,  who  had  consistently  op 
posed  the  program  of  the  League  to  Enforce  Peace,  raised 
his  voice  against  a  League  of  Nations.     Unconditional  sur 
render  for  Germany  and  independence  for  America  became 
the  war-cry  of  the  canvass.     When  on  October  25  the 
President  issued  an  open  letter  asking  for  the  election  of  a 
Democratic  Congress  so  that  he  might  be  assured  of  assist 
ance  in  negotiating  the  sort  of  peace  he  had  promised  the 
nation,  his  action  was  criticized  as  unnecessarily  partisan. 
Henry  Ford,  who  was  running  for  the  Senate  in  Michigan, 
and  Secretary  of  War  Baker  were  described  as  pacifists. 

The  day  of  election  was  the  day  that  President  Wilson 
transmitted  to  Germany  the  decision  of  the  Supreme  War 
Council  to  receive  the  German  envoys  begging  peace.  The 
war  was  over,  and  the  votes  that  were  cast  that  day  insured 
the  return  of  the  Republican  Party  to  power  in  Congress, 
with  easy  control  of  the  House  and  a  probable  majority  in 
the  Senate.  "In  no  other  free  country  in  the  world  to 
day  would  Mr.  Wilson  be  in  office"  was  the  comment  of 
Roosevelt  upon  the  election. 

The  disbanding  of  the  army  of  the  LTnited  States  began 
within  a  few  hours  of  the  signing  of  the  armistice.  The  Third 
Field  Army,  which  had  been  organized  by  Pershing  during 
the  battle  of  the  Argonne,  was  designated  to  march  into 
Germany  as  a  part  of  the  army  of  occupation;  but  prepa 
rations  were  made  to  send  all  the  other  troops  home  as 
rapidly  as  transportation  could  be  provided,  and  the  Ameri 
can  camps  were  emptied  within  the  next  few  weeks.  The 
restrictions  upon  industry  that  had  been  administered  by 
the  War  Industries  Board  were  relaxed  at  once,  and  when 
Congress  met  on  December  2  the  President  spoke  with  con 
fidence  of  the  speedy  resumption  of  the  ordinary  course  of 
life.  Two  days  later  he  set  sail  on  the  army  transport, 
George  Washington,  for  Brest  and  the  Peace  Conference. 

The  American  Commission  to  Negotiate  Peace  had  at  its 


558     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

head  the  President  of  the  United  States,  as  the  commission 
of  each  other  Allied  country  was  presided  over 

American          .  .  ,  .   .      .  >    rr    .  . 

Commission    by  its  most  important  political  official.     Assist- 


were  f°ur  °ther  members:  Robert  Lan 
sing,  the  Secretary  of  State;  Edward  M.  House, 
who  had  acted  since  1914  as  confidential  agent;  General 
Tasker  H.  Bliss,  who  had  represented  the  United  States  on 
the  Supreme  War  Council  from  its  formation;  and  Henry 
White,  whose  diplomatic  service  had  included  many  years  at 
Vienna,  London,  Rome,  and  Paris.  There  was  no  Senator 
on  the  commission,  and,  in  spite  of  the  result  of  the  Novem 
ber  election,  no  active  member  of  the  party  that  was  to  dom 
inate  the  Congress  to  which  the  peace  treaty  would  have 
to  be  submitted.  There  were,  however,  some  hundreds 
of  other  assistants  representing  the  State  Department,  the 
"House  inquiry,"  and  the  various  war  boards  whose  mem 
bers  had  acquired  useful  information  upon  the  status  of 
world  affairs. 

Only  a  few  of  the  better  informed  among  European 
leaders  knew  enough  of  American  institutions  to  appreciate 
the  fact  that  a  President  serves  out  his  term  whatever  the 
result  of  a  Congressional  election.  The  additional  fact 
that  the  adverse  Congress  would  not  meet  earlier  than 
December,  1919,  unless  specially  summoned,  served  to  ob 
scure  the  vote  of  dissatisfaction  that  Wilson  had  received. 
To  most  of  Europe  he  was  in  office,  and  hence  in  full  power. 
His  had  been  the  decisive  leadership  whose  democratic 
idealism  held  the  Allies  together  and  disintegrated  the 
morale  of  the  enemy.  Europe,  when  he  "touched  its 
shores,"  wrote  an  old  and  keen  observer  of  world  politics, 
E.  J.  Dillon,  "was  as  clay  ready  for  the  creative  potter. 
Never  before  were  the  nations  so  eager  to  follow  a  Moses 
who  would  take  them  to  the  long-promised  land  where  wars 
are  prohibited  and  blockades  unknown.  ...  In  France  men 
bowed  down  before  him  in  awe  and  affection.  .  .  .  To  the 
working  classes  of  Italy  his  name  was  a  heavenly  clarion 
at  the  sound  of  which  the  earth  would  be  renewed.  .  .  .  The 
Germans  regarded  him  and  his  humane  doctrine  as  their 


PEACE  AND  THE   LEAGUE  OF  NATIONS         559 

sheet-anchor  of  safety. ...  In  German  Austria  his  fame  was 
that  of  a  savior."  But  in  the  United  States  he  had  lost  his 
power ;  and  the  politicians  of  the  Old  World  knew  that  if  they 
could  withstand  the  pressure  of  their  own  liberal  classes 
until  national  suspicion  should  supersede  the  wave  of  ideal 
ism,  they  could  prevent  the  writing  of  the  Wilson  doctrine 
into  the  Peace  of  Versailles. 

It  was  perhaps  because  of  this  official  willingness  to  let 
the  wave  subside  that  the  Peace  Conference  was  unready 
to  begin  its  sessions  when  the  American  delega-  Europe  and 
tion  arrived.  The  Supreme  War  Council  was  the  peace 
yet  at  work  upon  the  details  of  the  execution  of  the  armi 
stice,  and  the  courts  of  Europe  clamored  for  visits  from 
the  President  of  the  United  States.  Arriving  at  Brest  on 
December  13,  he  proceeded  to  Paris,  where  he  was  wel 
comed  with  a  succession  of  ceremonious  greetings.  Christ 
mas  was  spent  at  Chaumont  with  the  army.  London  was 
visited  the  next  week,  and  Rome  just  after  the  new  year. 
Before  Wilson  returned  to  Paris  Herbert  C.  Hoover  was 
made  Director  ot  the  Supreme  Council  of  Supply  and  Re 
lief,  for  the  relief  of  the  devastated  region ;  and  the  Govern 
ment  of  Lloyd  George  had  been  confirmed  in  its  powers  by 
huge  majorities  after  a  parliamentary  campaign  in  which 
England  had  been  promised  that  Germany  should  pay  for 
the  war.  Clemenceau,  at  the  same  time,  asked  and  re 
ceived  from  his  parliament  an  approval  of  his  avowed 
determination  to  work  for  a  new  and  useful  system  of 
alliances  in  the  approaching  meeting.  On  January  12, 
1919,  the  formal  preparations  for  the  Peace  Conference 
were  begun,  and  six  days  later  the  first  plenary  session  was 
held  at  the  French  Foreign  Office,  with  Clemenceau  as 
president. 

The  hopes  and  aspirations  of  the  little  nations  for  a  new 
world  order  in  which  their  weight  would  equal  that  of  the 
larger  powers  began  to  wane  with  the  opening  of  the  con 
ference.  Seats  were  provided  for  nearly  seventy  delegates 
from  the  twenty-eight  nations  associated  against  Ger 
many,  but  their  assignment  was  made,  not  by  the  confer- 


5<3o    RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

ence,  but  by  an  inner  and  dominant  circle,  the  Supreme 
War  Council,  as  modified  by  the  Arrival  of  Wilson.  The 
President,  with  the  three  premiers  of  England,  Erance,  and 
Italy,  and  their  foreign  secretaries,  and  two  delegates  from 
Japan,  constituted  a  Council  of  Ten  from  whose  decisions  it 
was  useless  to  appeal.  As  the  weeks  ran  on  and  debate 
protracted  the  discussions,  the  Council  of  Ten  was  reduced 
first  by  the  elimination  of  the  foreign  secretaries,  and 
then  by  the  elimination  of  the  Japanese,  until  at  the  end 
a  Council  of  Four,  or  the  "Big  Four,"  sat  together  in  in 
formal  conference  day  after  day,  hearing  appeals  and  reach 
ing  decisions  which  the  Peace  Conference  was  allowed  to 
approve  and  enact  at  its  various  plenary  sessions. 

It  will  long  remain  a  matter  of  dispute  how  far  Wil 
son,  Lloyd  George,  Clemenceau,  and  Orlando  individually 
Wilson,  affected  the  decisions  of  the  "  Big  Four."  But 
Lloyd  the  earliest  action  taken  was  the  course  pro- 

deorge, 

Clemenceau,   posed  by  the  American  President.     The  peace 

and  Orlando     that  he  wag  pledged   to  WQrk  for  wag  Qne  that 

might  tend  to  end  war  by  removing  its  causes.  The  "  peace 
without  victory"  that  he  advocated  in  1917  had  become  a 
"peace  of  justice"  in  his  later  utterances,  and  had  in  sub 
stance  received  acceptance  as  expressed  in  his  "fourteen 
points."  In  his  mind  the  recurrence  of  war  could  be  pre 
vented  in  two  ways:  by  maintaining  the  Allied  military 
power  on  such  a  scale  that  resistance  would  be  impossible, 
or  by  making  a  generous  peace  which  all  nations,  enemy 
or  Allied,  would  be  interested  in  upholding.  The  latter 
alternative  involved  the  creation  of  a  League  of  Nations 
through  which  common  decisions  could  be  reached  and  the 
common  power  be  exerted  for  the  benefit  of  all.  His  critics 
at  home  demanded  peace  first,  and  then,  if  at  all,  negotia 
tion  for  a  league.  To  him  it  appeared  necessary  to  have 
first  a  league  whose  promise  would  make  it  possible  to  have 
a  stable  peace.  At  the  second  plenary  session  of  the  Peace 
Conference,  January  25,  Wilson  spoke  on  behalf  of  a  League 
of  Nations;  the  conference  agreed  to  proceed  to  its  formula 
tion  and  created  a  Commission  on  the  League  of  Nations  to 


PEACE  AND  THE  LEAGUE  OF  NATIONS        561 

that  end;  and  three  weeks  later  the  covenant  of  the  League 
was  reported  back  to  the  conference  for  adoption. 

The  machinery  of  the  Peace  Conference  was  complicated 
because  of  the  multitude  of  problems  pressing  for  solution. 
Every  nation  and  every  faction  with  a  grievance  appeared 
with  a  delegation  to  demand  hearing  under  the  principle  of 
"self-determination,"  and  \vhen  the  interests  of  rival  groups 
inevitably  clashed  there  was  only  unpopularity  to  be  gained, 
whatever  the  decision.  At  the  same  time  the  administra 
tion  of  relief  was  taxing  the  resources  of  the  Allies,  while  the 
military  authorities  were  watching  with  minute  suspicion 
the  conduct  of  Germany  under  the  armistice.  Russia  was 
still  at  war,  with  a  Bolshevist  Government  at  the  head  of  a 
new  system  of  Soviets,  and  was  threatening  the  world  with 
proletarian  revolution.  If  Germany  was  left  prostrate 
there  was  danger  of  her  infection  with  Bolshevism  that  she 
might  pass  on  to  western  Europe.  If  she  were  allowed  to 
survive  in  comfort  there  was  danger  of  the  revival  of  mili 
tarism.  In  addition  to  the  Commission  on  the  League  of 
Nations,  created  on  January  25,  the  Peace  Conference  ap 
pointed  a  Commission  on  Responsibility  for  the  War,  and 
other  Commissions  on  Reparations,  Labor,  and  Transpor 
tation.  A  Supreme  Economic  Council  was  organized  Feb 
ruary  8,  to  administer  such  matters  as  finance,  food,  ship 
ping,  blockade,  and  raw  materials. 

The  draft  of  the  covenant  for  the  League  of  Nations  was 
presented  by  President  Wilson  to  the  whole  conference  at 
the  third  plenary  session,  February  14,  1919.     It 
went  beyond  the  type  of  international  court  that    Of°the  " 
had  been  discussed  at  the  two  Hague  Confer-    League  of 

Nations 

ences,  and  created  instead  a  large  assembly  for 
the  discussion  of  international  problems,  and  a  small  coun 
cil  for  the  formulation  of  decisions.  The  guarantees  were 
so  sweeping  as  to  make  unnecessary  the  military  staff  which 
France  urged  for  her  own  defense.  Like  the  old  Congress 
under  the  Articles  of  Confederation,  the  Council  could  take 
important  action  only  when  unanimous.  The  powers  of 
the  League  went  far  enough  to  raise  fair  questions  as  to 


562    RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

their  jurisdiction  over  problems  that  nations  might  regard 
as  domestic  and  within  their  own  control.  The  Peace  Con 
ference  accepted  the  draft  at  once,  and  the  next  day  Wilson 
sailed  from  Brest  for  a  brief  visit  to  Washington  where  his 
last  Democratic  Congress  was  winding  up  its  work. 

Reaction  in  the  United  States  followed  close  upon  the 
exaltation  of  spirit  that  accompanied  the  exertions  to 
place  the  nation  upon  a  "work-or-fight"  basis.  For  most 
Americans  it  was  a  new  accomplishment  to  think  seriously 
or  consecutively  on  European  or  world  affairs.  While  the 
war  was  on,  and  American  divisions  appeared  to  be  adding 
the  definitive  weight  for  victory,  it  was  easy  to  think  of 
permanent  participation  in  world  politics.  But  the  political 
habits  of  a  century  and  a  quarter  were  so  tough  that  they 
could  not  be  destroyed  by  a  single  experience,  and,  with  the 
fighting  over,  it  was  easy  to  revert  to  the  habit  of  regarding 
America  as  apart  from  the  rest  of  the  world.  The  counsels 
of  Washington  and  Monroe  recurred  to  the  American  mind, 
and  were  the  more  welcome  since  the  new  course  promised 
trouble  and  expense,  and  perhaps  some  loss  of  national 
freedom  of  action.  The  deep  resentment  at  being  disturbed 
by  foreign  matters  that  was  displayed  between  1914  and 
1917  reappeared,  and  Americans  made  haste  to  resume  the 
business  that  had  been  interrupted  by  the  excursion  into 
war. 

Demobilization  of  the  armed  forces  progressed  rapidly. 
On  the  day  of  the  armistice  there  were  3,703,273  men  and 
Demobili-  women  in  the  army  of  the  United  States.  More 
zationin  than  half  of  these  were  with  the  expeditionary 
forces,  and  were  parts  of  a  machine  that  needed 
now  to  be  reversed  in  order  to  bring  them  home.  In  nearly 
every  other  country  the  stages  of  demobilization  had  been 
under  serious  study  since  early  in  the  war,  in  order  that  in 
dustry  should  not  be  upset  and  huge  numbers  of  released 
soldiers  turned  loose  upon  the  street.  No  such  prepara 
tion  was  made  in  America,  though  the  Council  of  National 
Defense  and  the  General  Staff  both  talked  about  it.  The 
military  units  were  broken  up  and  disbanded  one  by  one, 


PEACE  AND  THE  LEAGUE  OF  NATIONS        563 

and  by  the  summer  of  1919  discharges  had  been  issued  to 
2,736,654.  As  the  divisions  came  back  they  were  greeted 
with  civic  and  national  welcome;  the  officers  and  men  re 
ceived  the  sixty-dollar  bonus  that  Congress  voted  them, 
sewed  the  red  chevron  of  discharge  upon  their  sleeves,  and 
passed  back  into  civil  life. 

During  May,  1919,  the  men  themselves  prepared  to  per 
petuate  the  memory  of  their  service,  and  held  in  St.  Louis  a 
representative  convention  out  of  which  the  American  Legion 
emerged  as  the  most  important  military  society  of  the 
war.  A  few  officers  and  men  started  the  movement  in  Paris 
earlier  in  the  year,  mindful  of  the  dignity  of  the  Grand  Army 
of  the  Republic  and  anxious  to  become  a  force  at  an  earlier 
date  than  the  G.A.R.  had  been.  In  November,  on  the  first 
anniversary  of  the  armistice,  the  first  formal  convention  of 
the  order  was  held  in  Minneapolis.  The  Grand  Army  had 
found  it  impossible  to  avoid  the  elevation  of  the  pension 
problem  as  its  noisiest  task.  Soldiers'  bonus  bills  were 
already  in  evidence  before  the  meeting  of  the  American 
Legion,  and  attempts  were  in  the  making  to  turn  it  into  a 
machine  for  gaining  bonus  votes. 

The  shapeless  demobilization  of  the  army  and  of  war 
industry,  which  took  place  in  the  same  months  in  which 
the  War  Department  canceled  its  outstanding  contracts, 
caused  unemployment  in  the  cities.  The  United  States 
Employment  Service  exerted  itself  to  maintain  a  census  of 
employment  conditions,  and  to  improve  them,  until  Con 
gress  abolished  its  appropriation  after  July,  1919.  The 
Official  Bulletin,  which  had  been  the  only  reliable  means  of 
following  Government  actions  through  the  war,  had  been 
discontinued  in  the  preceding  March.  The  War  Trade 
Board  was  reduced  to  the  status  of  a  section  of  the  State 
Department,  and  the  Food  and  Fuel  Administrations  found 
that  the  backing  for  their  work  was  gone.  Government 
guidance  was  abolished  and  industry  was  left  to  shift  for 
itself. 

Congress  devoted  the  short  session  of  1918-19  to  the  com 
pletion  of  the  revision  of  the  Revenue  Law  that  had  been 


564     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

before  it  since  the  passage  of  the  War  Act  of  September, 
1917.  The  statute,  which  proposed  to  raise  $6,000,000,000 
in  the  next  fiscal  year,  was  awaiting  the  signature  of  the 
President  when  he  arrived  in  Boston  on  February  24.  The 
Victory  Liberty  Loan  of  $4,500,000,000  was  floated  in  May 
to  provide  funds  for  the  period  until  the  new  act  should 
be  productive.  McAdoo  had  ceased  to  be  Secretary  of  the 
Treasury,  his  place  being  taken  by  Carter  Glass,  of  Vir 
ginia,  who  had  played  a  leading  part  in  the  enactment  of 
the  Federal  Reserve  Act  in  1913. 

In  the  absence  of  legislation  to  give  form  and  program 
to  the  period  of  demobilization,  Secretary  of  Commerce 
Redfield  created  in  February,  1919,  an  Industrial  Board 
which  proposed  to  do  informally  what  the  war  boards  had 
accomplished  during  active  warfare.  The  experiment  was  a 
failure.  The  patriotic  incentive  to  cooperation  was  gone. 
Business  now  demanded  to  be  let  alone;  willing  to  scold  the 
Government  for  inconveniences  it  had  suffered,  it  was  not 
ready  to  make  a  voluntary  sacrifice  for  the  general  good. 
The  members  of  the  Industrial  Board  resigned  in  a  body  in 
May,  after  their  attempt  to  fix,  and  lower,  the  price  of  steel 
had  been  ruled  upon  by  Attorney-General  Palmer  as  prob 
ably  illegal.  The  anti-agreement  provisions  of  the  trust 
laws  became  once  more  effective  with  the  cessation  of  hos 
tilities,  and  the  combinations  which  the  government  had 
compelled  for  military  purposes  became  illegal  again. 

Congress  developed  no  new  leadership  to  face  the  prob 
lems  of  peace.  The  end  of  Democratic  ascendancy  was 
approaching  with  the  expiration  of  the  Sixty-Fifth  Congress 
on  March  4,  1919,  and  there  was  no  spirit  for  the  advo 
cacy  of  measures  that  could  not  pass.  The  absence  of  the 
President  in  Paris  during  most  of  the  session  further  de 
moralized  the  departing  majority.  For  six  years  Wilson's 
leadership  had  been  coercive  or  persuasive  at  every  point, 
and  with  each  success  in  his  program  there  had  been  a 
tendency  to  make  the  next  measure  more  completely  his. 
In  his  absence  his  party  associates  could  not  feel  his  im 
pressive  leadership ;  his  Cabinet  found  itself  without  a  head 


PEACE  AND  THE  LEAGUE  OF  NATIONS         565 

and  working  at  cross-purposes,  while  the  Republican  mi 
nority  promised  great  and  practical  things  for  the  future 
and  watched  with  complacency  every  event  that  revealed 
the  inconvenience  of  doing  business  without  the  President 
or  that  could  plausibly  be  ascribed  to  his  or  his  party's 
shortcomings. 

The  return  of  Wilson  to  Washington  in  February  was 
necessary  in  order  to  wind  up  the  affairs  of  the  session,  but 
produced  no  change  in  the  course  of  administra-  Wilson  back 
tion.  He  was  greeted  with  open  defiance  by  in  Washing- 
Republican.members  of  the  Senate,  who  were  to 
sit  in  the  next  session  as  part  of  the  majority.  These  had 
opened  a  debate  on  the  League  of  Nations  while  he  was  on 
the  ocean,  and  at  the  close  of  the  session  thirty-seven  of 
them,  more  than  enough  to  defeat  any  treaty,  signed  a  man 
ifesto  declaring  their  unwillingness  to  vote  for  the  cove 
nant  that  he  brought  from  Paris.  Unshaken  by  their  op 
position,  and  heartened  by  the  open  support  of  Taft  and 
many  other  Republicans,  Wilson  performed  his  necessary 
tasks  in  Washington  and  on  March  5  set  sail  again  for  Paris 
to  complete  his  work  at  the  Peace  Conference. 

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL  NOTE 

William  E.  Dodd,  Woodrow  Wilson  and  His  Work  (1920),  is  a  critical 
and  appreciative  biography  by  a  Virginia  historian,  and  is  probably  as 
reliable  as  can  be  written  until  the  confidential  files  are  opened.  George 
Creel,  The  War,  the  World,  and  Wilson  (1920),  is  a  panegyric,  but  by  a  war 
worker  who  was  in  a  position  to  know  many  facts.  Ray  Stannard  Baker, 
What  Wilson  Did  at  Paris  (1919),  is  by  the  chief  of  the  American  press 
bureau  at  Paris  during  the  treaty  deliberations.  Robert  Lansing,  The 
Peace  Negotiations,  a  Personal  Narrative  (1921),  is  the  earliest  account 
published  by  one  of  the  principal  negotiators.  J.  M.  Keynes,  Economic 
Consequences  of  the  Peace  (1919),  is  a  violent  attack  upon  the  treaty,  sup 
ported  by  a  mass  of  statistical  material  accumulated  by  the  writer  during 
his  service  with  the  British  delegation,  it  should  be  checked  by  Bernard 
M.  Baruch,  The  Making  of  the  Reparation  and  Economic  Sections  of  the 
Treaty  (1920),  and  C.  H.  Haskins  and  R.  H.  Lord,  Some  Problems  of  the 
Peace  Conference  (1920).  Edward  J  Dillon,  The  Inside  Story  of  the  Peace 
Conference  (1920),  contains  less  confidential  material  than  its  title  suggests. 
A  tract  much  used  by  opponents  of  the  treaty  is  W.  C.  Bullitt,  The  Bullitt 
Mission  to  Russia.  Testimony  before  the  Committee  on  Foreign  Relations, 
United  States  Senate,  of  W-  C.  Bullitt  (1919). 


CHAPTER  LVI 

RECONSTRUCTION 

THE  word  "reconstruction"  was  a  misnomer  in  1919  as  it 
had  been  in  1865.  In  the  period  following  the  Civil  War  its 
The  un-  use  ma^es  it  easy  to  obscure  the  fact  that  the 
settled  South  underwent  an  economic  and  social  revolu 

tion  while  in  the  North  the  rural  basis  of  society 
gave  way  to  industrial.  The  plans  then  made  and  the 
statutes  passed  with  reconstruction  in  view  failed  to  effect 
it,  and  society  proceeded  to  readjust  itself  to  changed  con 
ditions  in  spite  of  the  advice  of  its  political  guardians. 
In  1919  the  world  was  full  of  talk  of  reconstruction,  and  in 
many  countries  programs  were  evolved  fitting  each  individ 
ual  and  every  group  into  a  prearranged  niche  in  a  more  or 
less  logical  structure.  The  diplomats  at  Paris  manipulated 
the  boundaries  and  balance  of  international  powers;  par 
liaments  tried  to  house  their  people  and  to  put  the  citizen 
to  work  where  he  belonged;  party  leaders  promulgated 
doctrines  with  as  much  assurance  as  though  their  followers 
accepted  them.  But  the  tired  world  was  no  longer  plastic. 
Russia  was  in  evolutionary  revolt  and  not  able  or  willing  to 
respect  the  usages  of  nations.  The  "backward  nations" 
were  everywhere  restive  at  the  control  they  had  to  endure. 
Germany  was  beaten  to  the  ground,  but  only  the  blind 
could  think  of  keeping  her  there  forever.  The  working 
classes  among  the  Allies,  conscious  that  their  effort  made 
victory  possible,  were  enjoying  the  economic  improve 
ment  that  had  come  to  them  through  the  accident  of  war, 
and  were  determined  to  increase  rather  than  diminish  their 
future  share  in  the  output  of  the  world.  Unsettlement, 
national  and  international,  contained  its  unrevealed  prom 
ise  of  evolution,  while  hold-over  leaders  of  the  pre-war  age 
professed  to  reconstruct  society. 

President  Wilson  arrived  back  in  Paris  on  March  14, 


RECONSTRUCTION  567 

1919,  with  the  ominous  threat  of  the  Senate  leaders  to 
wreck  the  treaty  ringing  in  his  ears;  with  his  Wilson  in 
opponents  spurred  on  by  his  defiance,  that  Pansagam 
"when  that  treaty  comes  back  gentlemen  on  this  side  will 
find  the  covenant  not  only  in  it,  but  so  many  threads  of  the 
treaty  tied  to  the  covenant,  that  you  cannot,  dissect  the 
covenant  from  the  treaty  without  destroying  the  whole 
vital  structure";  and  with  the  knowledge  that  his  ranking 
adviser,  Secretary  of  State  Lansing,  was  in  thorough  disap 
proval  of  both  the  protracted  negotiations,  and  the  nature 
of  the  projected  league.  During  his  absence,  he  found,  the 
other  American  delegates  had  consented  to  shelve  the  League 
in  the  interest  of  immediate  peace.  He  learned  as  well 
that  France  was  unwilling  to  accept  the  League  as  sufficient 
guarantee  along  the  Rhine  frontier,  and  that  Italy  was  un 
willing  to  sign  the  German  peace  until  assured  that  her  own 
claims  to  territory  along  the  Adriatic  would  be  protected. 
Secret  treaties  signed  in  the  darkest  period  of  the  war  were 
openly  brought  forth  pledging  the  Allies  to  support  Italy 
against  Austria  and  Jugo-Slavia,  and  Japan  as  conqueror 
of  and  successor  to  German  rights  in  China.  America 
was  no  party  to  these,  but  their  European  signers  brought 
into  danger  the  doctrines  of  self-determination  and  open 
covenants.  Germany  was  threatened  with  annihilation 
through  the  medium  of  reparations  that  were  in  effect 
punitive  indemnities,  and  unbearable  at  that.  The  free 
dom  of  the  seas  was  not  even  discussed.  Equality  of  na 
tions  had  been  forgotten.  And  the  peace  that  was  to  end 
wars  because  of  its  essential  moderation  and  justice  was 
fading  away.  There  was  even  fair  question  whether  the 
associates  could  be  brought  to  agree  to  any  peace  at  all. 

The  burden  and  complexity  of  the  negotiations  hastened 
the  concentration  of  power  in  the  Peace  Conference  in  the 
hands  of  Wilson,  Clemenceau,  and  Lloyd  George,  with  Or 
lando  generally  a  fourth.  Every  attack  was  focused  upon 
Wilson,  since  he  alone,  by  conviction,  stood  agamst  a  peace 
of  barter  and  balance  of  power,  and  struggled  to  rescue  some 
of  the  liberalism  that  had  made  the  last  year  of  war  look  like 


568     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

the  dawning  of  a  new  age  of  international  fair  play.  Early 
in  April  the  ravage  of  influenza,  that  had  washed  over  the 
world  in  the  winter  of  1918-19,  laid  him  prostrate;  and  the 
conferences  of  the  "Big  Four"  in  his  Paris  residence  were 
held  with  him  in  the  adjacent  sick-room.  He  had  planned  a 
one-man  task,  and  what  he  could  not  himself  accomplish  no 
one  could  do  for  him.  He  met  the  critics  of  the  covenant  by 
obtaining  a  recognition  of  the  Monroe  Doctrine,  and  pre 
vented  the  inclusion  of  the  racial  equality  demanded  by  Ja 
pan.  The  latter  victory  was  paid  for  by  his  reluctant  accept 
ance  of  Japan  as  the  inheritor  of  Germany  in  Shantung ;  with 
the  result  that  China  felt  herself  betrayed  and  every  weaker 
nation  lost  confidence  in  the  fairness  of  the  peace. 

What  Wilson  saved  of  his  liberal  program  he  saved  by 
compromise  or  threat.  On  April  6  he  ordered  the  George 
Compromises  Washington  to  Brest,  and  by  this  intimation  of 
of  the  Peace  his  willingness  to  abandon  the  Peace  Conference 
held  his  associates  to  their  work.  He  refused  to 
assent  to  the  binding  force  of  the  secret  Italian  treaty  of 
1915;  but  was  induced  to  agree  to  a  compromise  whereby 
France  was  enabled  to  secure  the  mineral  output  of  the 
Saar  Valley  whose  population  was  almost  entirely  German. 
The  treaty  as  it  was  submitted  to  the  fourth  plenary  ses 
sion  of  the  Peace  Conference  on  April  28  was  the  best 
treaty  that  the  five  Great  Powers  could  be  induced  to  sign 
unanimously,  but  departed  far  from  the  altruism  of  the 
"fourteen  points."  It  contained  as  its  most  promising  fea 
ture,  so  far  as  the  peace  of  the  world  was  concerned,  a  re 
vised  covenant  for  the  League  of  Nations.  In  this  organi 
zation,  working  through  the  council  of  nine —  the  five  Great 
Powers  and  Belgium,  Brazil,  Greece,  and  Spain — it  would 
be  possible  to  negotiate  the  undoing  of  the  worst  features  of 
the  treaty  itself,  as  passions  should  subside  with  the  pass 
ing  of  the  years. 

The  treaty  was  handed  to  the  German  delegates  on  May 
7,  by  Clemenceau,  who  recalled  the  last  occasion  when 
German  and  French  envoys  had  fnet  in  the  palace  at  Ver 
sailles.  For  him  the  treaty  was  the  victory  of  his  philosophy 


RECONSTRUCTION  569 

of  force;  for  them  it  was  the  last  stage  of  the  bitterness  of 
complete  defeat.  They  signed  it,  with  slight  modifications, 
on  June  28,  1919;  and  on  the  same  day  Lloyd  George  and 
Wilson  signed  treaties  with  the  French  providing  for  the 
defense  of  the  left  bank  of  the  Rhine  in  case  Germany 
should  endanger  it.  The  President  left  Paris  that  night, 
sailed  for  New  York  immediately,  and  on  July  10  pre 
sented  the  treaty  and  the  covenant  to  the  Senate  in  open 
executive  session. 

The  stubbornness  of  the  Senate  that  showed  itself  when 
John  Hay  negotiated  his  first  treaty  with  Lord  Pauncefote, 
in  1900,  as  well  as  when  Cleveland,  Roosevelt,    The  Sen. 
and  Taft  concluded  their  successive  treaties  for    ate  and 

,        ,  .          .  treaties 

international  arbitration,  endangers  the  success 
of  any  American  treaty  that  is  not  one-sided  in  favoring  the 
United  States.  The  Spanish  Treaty  of  1898  was  ratified 
only  because  the  leader  of  the  opposition,  who  himself  de 
cried  the  annexation  of  island  colonies,  brought  his  influence 
to  prevent  the  defeat  of  peace.  LInder  the  Constitution  the 
President  has  power,  "by  and  with  the  advice  and  consent 
of  the  Senate,  to  make  treaties,  provided  two  thirds  of  the 
senators  present  concur,"  but  the  minority  of  the  body  that 
is  thus  enabled  to  defeat  any  treaty  is  under  constant  temp 
tation  to  be  influenced  more  by  party  jealousies  and  indi 
vidual  antipathies  than  by  the  non-partisan  view  of  national 
interest  that  ought  to  prevail  in  international  affairs.  Be 
fore  the  President  presented  the  treaty  in  person,  a  copy  of 
the  document  had  been  brought  to  Washington  by  a  jour 
nalist  who  managed  to  obtain  it  privately  in  Paris.  Its  text 
was  read  into  the  Congressional  Record  by  Borah,  of  Idaho, 
on  June  9,  and  the  general  debate  that  had  begun  in  Febru 
ary  became  more  specific.  The  thirty-seven  signers  of  the 
Lodge  manifesto  were  still  determined,  and  one  of  them, 
Harding,  of  Ohio,  declared  that  "at  the  present  time  the 
preservation  of  American  nationality  rests  with  the  Senate 
of  the  United  States.  And  .  .  .  the  Senate  is  not  going  to 
fail  you." 

President  Wilson  demanded  the  ratification  of  the  treaty 


570    RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

without  amendment,  on  the  grounds  that  (i)  peace  could 
not  be  restored  until  the -document  was  ratified 
1 1  and  proclaimed,  (2)  any  American  amendment 
Versailles  would  force  the  reopening  of  the  whole  con 
ference,  since  no  change  in  the  text  would  be 
binding  until  approved  by  every  signatory,  and  (3)  any 
modifications  upon  which  agreement  could  be  reached  at 
all  could  be  obtained  best  through  the  League  of  Nations 
which  the  ratification  of  the  treaty  would  bring  into  exist 
ence.  His  opponents  included  those  who  thought  the  docu 
ment  too  lenient  in  its  treatment  of  Germany  and  those 
who  believed  it  too  harsh.  Germans  in  the  United  States 
generally  opposed  it  on  the  latter  ground,  while  the  Irish 
disliked  it  because  England  had  gained  control  of  a  con 
siderable  number  of  former  German  colonies  through  the 
system  of  mandatories  created  in  the  treaty.  Liberals  and 
radicals,  who  had  been  close  to  the  President  in  support  of 
his  program  of  the  "fourteen  points,"  turned  against  him 
because  compromise  and  balance  of  power,  instead  of  inter 
nationalism,  had  prevailed  at  Paris.  Conservatives  took 
the  opposite  position  and  declared  that  American  inde 
pendence  had  been  sacrificed  to  the  League  of  Nations, 
and  that  under  Article  X  of  the  covenant  the  United  States 
could  be  forced  to  go  to  war  over  European  controversies 
and  counter  to  the  constitutional  provision  requiring  declar 
ations  of  war  to  be  made  by  Congress.  Between  those  who 
thought  the  treaty  too  reactionary,  and  those  who  saw  it  as 
a  document  of  national  surrender,  a  temporary  alliance  was 
made  to  defeat  it.  The  Nation  and  the  New  Republic,  the 
Socialists,  the  Irish,  and  the  Germans  found  strong  support 
among  great  bodies  of  Americans  who  had  had  enough  of 
war  in  Europe  and  desired  to  draw  back  to  the  isolated 
and  complete  independence  of  the  Monroe  Doctrine.  The 
irreconcilable  opposition  was  led  in  the  Senate  by  men  as 
far  apart  on  other  matters  as  Hiram  Johnson,  Robert  M.  La 
Follette,  William  E.  Borah,  and  Miles  Poindexter,  on  the 
one  hand,  and  Philander  C.  Knox,  Frank  B.  Brandegee, 
George  H.  Moses,  and  Lawrence  Y.  Sherman,  on  the  other. 


RECONSTRUCTION  571 

The  Sixty-Sixth  Congress,  elected  in   November,   1918, 
met  May  19,  1919,  upon  proclamation   cabled  by  Wilson 
from  Paris.   The  work  before  it  included  several    The  treaty 
of  the  ordinary  supply  bills,  whose  passage  at  the    session  of 
last  regular  session  had  been  blocked  by  a  Re 
publican  filibuster,  and  the  new  treaty.     In  the  House  the 
Republican   majority   had   no   difficulty   in   setting   aside 
James  R.  Mann,  of  Illinois,  its  former  leader,  and  selecting 
as  Speaker  Frederick  H.  Gillett,  of  Massachusetts.    Mann 
was  deposed  because  of  party  revolt  against  his  war  record 
and  his  attitude  prior  to  American  entry,  during  which  he 
had  described  the  Lusitania  victims  as  "joy-riders."    The 
control  of  the  Senate  was  in  doubt  until  the  last  minute. 
Of  the  ninety-six  Senators  only  a  bare  majority  (forty- 
nine)  could  be  claimed  for  the  Republicans,  and  this  only  by 
including  La  Follette  who  had  flaunted  the  regular  organi 
zation  and  voted  independently  for  years,  and  Newberry, 
newly  elected  from  Michigan.    The  latter  defeated  Henry 
Ford  in  the  preceding  November,  after  a  bitter  contest  in 
which  huge  funds  were  expended  by  the  victor  and  his 
friends,  and  in  which  Ford  was  denounced  as  pacifist  and 
anti-American.      Newberry  was  later  convicted  and  sen 
tenced  under  the  Federal  Corrupt  Practices  Act  which  the 
Supreme  Court,  on  appeal,  declared  unconstitutional.    But 
he  was  allowed  to  retain  his  seat  in  the  Senate  while  under 
indictment,  making  part  of  the  shaky  majority  that  organ 
ized  the  body  May  19,  1919,  and  made  possible  the  appoint 
ment  of  Henry  Cabot  Lodge  as  chairman  of  the  Committee 
on  Foreign  Relations,  with  a  group  of  colleagues  knowrn  to 
be  opposed  to  the  ratification  of  the  treaty  as  signed. 

The  Treaty  of  Versailles  was  ratified  by  enough  European 
signers  to  enable  its  proclamation  January  10,  1920,  and  the 
first  meeting  of  the  Council  of  the  League  of  Na-    Fight  over 
tions  six  days  later;  while  in  the  United  States    ratlficatlon 
its  approval,  with  or  without  amendments  or  reservations, 
was  still  pending  in  the  Senate.    The   President  insisted 
that  the  good  faith  as  well  as  the  interests  of  the  United 
States  were  involved  in  its  acceptance.    Early  in  Septem- 


572     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

her  he  left  Washington  for  a  speaking  tour  of  the  Western 
States,  in  an  attempt  to  arouse  enthusiasm  for  it.  In  his 
own  party  there  were  out-spoken  opponents  of  the  treaty, 
while  its  Republican  advocates  were  becoming  more  will 
ing  to  qualify  their  acceptance.  The  country  as  a  whole 
had  lost  faith  in  the  possibility  of  rejuvenating  the  world, 
and  was  becoming  increasingly  absorbed  in  the  affairs  of 
its  own  existence.  Wilson  opened  his  tour  September  4,  a 
week  before  the  Committee  on  Foreign  Relations  reported 
the  treaty  to  the  Senate  with  reservations.  He  crossed  the 
country  near  the  northern  border,  invaded  the  States  of 
Reed,  Borah,  Poindexter,  and  Johnson,  all  irreconcilables, 
and  was  on  his  way  home  through  the  Middle  West  with 
the  result  of  his  campaign  uncertain,  when  on  September 
26  his  physicians  ended  the  tour  abruptly  and  sent  him 
back  to  the  White  House  a  sick  and  broken  man. 

The  precise  nature  of  the  disease  and  the  degree  of  the 
incapacity  were  not  revealed  to  the  country,  and  once 
Collapse  of  more,  as  in  the  summer  of  1881,  when  Garfield 
Wilson  jay  on  h'ls  deathbed,  the  failure  of  the  Consti 

tution  to  provide  for  such  contingency  was  noticed  and  de 
plored.  On  October  14  Secretary  Lansing  began  to  hold  in 
formal  meetings  of  the  Cabinet  with  the  supposed  approval 
of  the  invalid,  but  was  dismissed  by  Wilson  on  this  ground 
four  months  later.  Not  until  February,  1920,  did  the  Pres 
ident  resume  active  work  of  any  sort,  and  then  under  con 
ditions  that  suggested  the  end  of  his  political  control  of  his 
party.  Bryan  at  a  meeting  of  the  Democratic  National 
Committee  opposed  Wilson's  desire  to  make  the  next  elec 
tion  a  "solemn  referendum  "  on  the  treaty;  members  of  his 
Cabinet  dropped  out  or  were  dismissed  until  by  April  there 
were  five  new  heads. 

The  treaty  had  a  varied  career.  It  was  tabled  in  the 
Senate  November  19,  1919,  because  of  the  impossibility  of 
ratifying  it  with  or  without  reservations.  In  February, 
1920,  it  was  taken  up  again  in  the  hope  of  finding  a  com 
promise,  but  failed  of  the  necessary  two  thirds  on  March  19. 
In  May  an  effort  was  made  to  terminate  the  state  of  war  by 


RECONSTRUCTION  573 

joint  resolution  repealing  the  declaration  of  April  6,  1917; 
but  this  was  prevented  by  presidential  veto,  as  an  "in 
effaceable  stain  upon  the  gallantry  and  honor  of  the  United 
States."  With  the  rest  of  the  world  struggling  to  get  back 
to  peace,  the  United  States  remained  technically  at  war 
with  Germany  and  dissociated  from  the  League  of  Nations 
eighteen  months  after  hostilities  had  ceased. 

Internal  peace,  as  well  as  international,  was  disturbed 
during  the  Senate  fight  over  the  treaty.  From  a  state  of 
war,  with  elaborate  Government  control  over 
every  relationship  of  life,  there  had  been  the  and  labor** 
sharp  transition  into  non-war,  if  not  real  peace,  J^s^tle" 
with  individual  competition  resumed  and  with 
world  shortage  disturbing  the  equilibrium  of  every  industry. 
Extravagance  and  scarcity,  high  prices  and  labor  unsettle- 
ment,  unfulfilled  hopes  of  a  millennium  and  opportunities  for 
successful  greed,  profiteering  in  material  things  and  effort  to 
gain  advantage  for  panaceas  of  reform,  crowded  before  a 
public  that  was  wearied  with  efforts  and  lacked  admitted 
leaders.  Roosevelt,  whose  generation  was  over,  had  laid 
down  his  powers  early  in  1919,  and  though  the  simple  grave 
at  Oyster  Bay  attracted  pilgrims  by  thousands  the  voice 
was  silent.  Wilson  was  sick,  and  among  a  multitude  of 
noisy  advisers  of  the  public  there  was  none  that  gained  its 
ear  as  he  had  done.  Labor  in  particular,  always  first  to  feel 
a  change  in  the  conditions  of  life,  was  restive.  Flattered  by 
the  attentions  received  during  the  war  and  somewhat  daz 
zled  by  proletarian  successes  in  Russia,  its  status  was  now 
challenged  by  its  ancient  enemies,  and  its  leaders  seized 
the  occasion  to  reassert  its  claim. 

In  the  basic  fields  of  transportation,  coal,  and  steel, 
strikes  were  impending  during  the  summer  of  1919.  The 
railroad  workers  had  received  less  increase  than  most  other 
union  men.  In  1916  the  Adamson  Act  fixed  for  them  the 
basic  eight-hour  day,  which  the  Supreme  Court  upheld  in 
the  following  March.  This  improved  their  condition,  but 
failed  to  keep  pace  with  rising  prices.  When  the  war  began 
no  other  industry  suffered  more  than  theirs.  The  railroad 


574     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

regiments,  and  enlistments  for  other  line  duty,  depleted  their 
numbers.  Troop  movements  and  the  great  mass  of  war 
freights  called  for  military  precision  in  their  work.  The 
public  took  the  sound  attitude  that  a  railroad  strike  would 
amount  to  treason,  and  the  Railroad  Administration  did 
what  it  could  during  1918  to  equalize  their  pay.  But  there 
was  no  practical  way  to  give  them  relief  against  the  rising 
prices  after  the  armistice.  A  threatened  strike  in  the  sum 
mer  of  1919  was  deferred  upon  appeal  from  Wilson  to  wait 
for  six  months  in  order  to  allow  his  plans  for  lowering  prices 
to  become  effective.  In  the  following  winter  he  was  too 
sick  to  initiate  measures  of  relief,  although  A.  Mitchell 
Palmer,  the  Attorney-General,  administered  what  remained 
of  the  powers  under  the  Food  and  Fuel  Act  of  1917, 
and  organized  fair-price  committees  and  sought  evidence 
against  profiteers.  But  prices  continued  to  rise,  and  in  the 
spring  of  1920  the  public  demand  for  goods  persisted  in  spite 
of  them.  The  six-months  period  expired,  and  the  railroad 
men  were  next  asked  to  await  the  decision  of  Congress  as 
to  the  future  control  of  the  railroads,  and  to  bring  their  re 
quest  to  their  future  employers.  Their  protracted  uneasi 
ness  made  it  hard  for  the  roads  to  procure  labor,  lowered 
the  efficiency  of  all  railroad  service,  and  encouraged  other 
groups  to  more  stubborn  struggles. 

A  great  steel  strike  was  started  on  September  22,  1919, 
aiming  to  force  the  United  States  Steel  Corporation  to  rec- 
Steel  strike  ognize  the  unions.  The  leaders  that  directed  it 
of  1919  belonged  to  the  radical  group,  and  were  charac 
terized  by  their  opponents  as  socialist,  anarchist,  bolshevist, 
and  I -WAV.  There  had  been  no  great  strike  in  this  indus 
try  since  the  two  failures  at  Homestead  in  1892  and  1901. 
Gary,  Indiana,  the  company  town  of  the  Steel  Corporation, 
was  the  center  of  the  strike,  which  lasted  officially  until 
January  8,  1920.  Long  before  it  was  called  off  it  was  a  fail 
ure.  Steel  orders  had  passed  their  peak,  and  high  prices 
were  discouraging  to  new  construction.  The  steel  mills  were 
able  to  get  non-union  labor  for  what  work  they  had  to  do. 
Public  opinion  turned  against  the  strike  because  a  demand 


RECONSTRUCTION  575 

by  the  workers  to  share  in  the  direction  of  their  industries 
looked  like  the  beginnings  of  sovietism,  and  this  aversion 
obscured  public  notice  of  the  repudiation  of  collective  bar 
gaining  and  the  refusal  to  let  union  men  hire  halls  or  deliver 
public  lectures 

The  coal  strike  oegan  in  the  Indiana  fields  on  November 
i,  1919,  in  spite  of  notice  from  the  President  that  such  a 
strike  would  be  regarded  as  illegal  under  the  Food  and  Fuel 
Act  that  forbade  conspiracies  to  hinder  production  while 
the  state  of  war  lasted.  The  Government  immediately 
procured  a  mandatory  order  upon  the  officers  of  the  United 
Mine  Workers  directing  them  to  recall  the  strike.  This  they 
complied  with,  under  protest,  and  in  the  American  Federa 
tion  of  Labor  the  voice  of  Gompers  was  raised  against  the 
doctrine  that  any  strike  could  be  forbidden  as  contrary  to 
public  interest.  A  federal  commission  was  named  in  Decem 
ber  to  adjust  the  wage  matter;  and  a  year  later,  when  the 
anthracite  miners  became  discontented,  they  profited  by 
the  experience  of  1919,  and  declared  no  strike.  The  men 
concerned  merely  took  a  concerted  "vacation"  against 
which  no  legal  action  was  possible.  A  strike  of  the  police 
force  in  Boston  gave  special  emphasis  to  the  claim  of  labor 
to  the  unlimited  right  to  strike.  Governor  Calvin  Coolidge 
denied  that  public  guardians  possessed  this  right.  He  was 
reflected  in  November,  1919,  largely  upon  this  issue,  and 
though  a  Republican  received  a  warm  letter  of  congratula 
tion  from  President  Wilson 

The  American  delay  in  ratifying  the  peace  treaty  was 
emphasized  when  on  October  29,  1919,  the  international 
labor  conference  arranged  for  at  Paris  convened  Labor  con_ 
in  Washington  to  draw  up  a  general  platform  for  ferences  and 
labor  betterment.  One  attempt  to  do  this  for 
the  United  States  had  already  failed.  An  industrial  con 
ference,  meeting  on  October  6,  had  broken  up  in  less  than 
three  weeks  because  of  the  inability  of  the  delegates  of  capi 
tal,  labor,  and  the  general  public  to  find  common  ground  for 
discussion.  A  second  industrial  conference,  likewise  called 
by  the  President,  met  on  December  I,  with  Herbert  C. 


576     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

Hoover  as  its  dominant  personality.  A  manifesto  on  in 
dustrial  relations,  published  by  this  body  some  months 
later,  was  swallowed  up  in  the  presidential  campaign. 

A  menace  of  revolutionary  radicalism  was  believed  by 
many  to  be  connected  with  the  labor  troubles.  About  Sep 
tember  I,  1919,  the  Socialist  Party  split,  and  a  "left  wing," 
which  the  regulars  later  expelled,  formed  itself  into  the 
Communist  Party,  and  proclaimed  allegiance  to  the  Social 
ist  Internationale  that  had  recently  sat  at  Moscow.  Leaders 
of  this  party  were  later  tried  and  convicted  under  the  Espi 
onage  Act,  which  remained  enforceable  even  after  hostilities 
ceased.  A  general  cry  against  socialism  and  the  '"reds"  was 
heard  throughout  the  country,  and  the  Department  of  Jus 
tice  proceeded,  under  the  Alien  Deportation  Act,  to  round 
up  foreign  agitators  who  were  believed  to  be  dangerous.  At 
Christmas  the  transport  Buford  sailed  for  Finland  with  a 
cargo  of  such  aliens,  who  were  thus  carried  back  to  the  Rus 
sia  of  their  revolutionary  hopes.  Victor  L.  Berger  was  made 
a  national  figure  during  the  reaction  against  socialism.  He 
had  attained  some  fame  in  1910  as  the  first  Socialist  to  sit 
in  Congress.  In  1919  he  was  convicted  of  a  conspiracy  to 
obstruct  the  draft,  and  although  reflected  to  Congress  in 
1918  was  not  allowed  to  take  his  seat.  At  a  special  election 
after  his  unseating  his  Milwaukee  constituency  elected  him 
again;  and  again  in  January,  1920,  the  House  held  that  he 
was  not  entitled  to  take  his  oath.  His  district  this  time 
remained  without  a  representative. 

In  New  York  five  Socialists  who  had  been  chosen  to  the 
Assembly  were  expelled  on  the  avowed  ground  that  mem 
bers  of  their  party  could  not  be  both  consistent  and  loyal ; 
and  when  these  were  reflected  to  succeed  themselves,  three 
of  them  were  again  unseated  in  September,  1920.  Charles 
Evans  Hughes  protested  against  the  expulsion,  with  the 
support  of  both  the  Tribune  and  the  World,  and  Lieutenant- 
Colonel  Theodore  Roosevelt,  Jr.,  made  a  similar  protest  in 
his  maiden  speech  in  the  New  York  Assembly.  Uneasy  rad 
icalism  struggled  against  reaction  throughout  the  country, 
while  the  deadlocked  Senate  kept  the  nation  out  of  peace. 


RECONSTRUCTION  577 


BIBLIOGRAPHICAL  NOTE 

In  the  absence  of  reliable  books  dealing  with  the  immediate  past,  the 
student  must  turn  to  periodical  literature.  The  Weekly  Review  (May, 
1919-)  was  started  to  combat  "unthinking  liberalism"  and  entered  upon 
weekly  arguments  with  the  Nat-ion,  the  New  Republic,  and  the  Freeman. 
The  standard  economic  periodicals  contain  many  articles  on  current  labor 
and  industry.  William  Z.  Foster,  The  Great  Steel  Strike  (1920),  is  a  highly 
partisan  account  by  a  professional  labor  organizer;  The  Interchurch  Report 
on  the  Steel  Strike  (1920)  is  based  on  sympathetic  and  scientific  investiga 
tion.  Much  material  upon  the  treaty  is  in  E.  M.  House  and  C.  Sey 
mour  (Eds.),  What  Really  Happened  at  Paris  (1921),  and  "Treaty  of  Peace 
with  Germany.  Hearings  before  the  Committee  on  Foreign  Relations, 
United  States  Senate"  (66th 'Cong.,  1st  Sess.,  Sen.  Doc.  106). 


CHAPTER  LVII 

THE  ELECTION  OF  IQ2O 

THE  year  1920  may  well  be  remembered  because  the  Con 
stitution  of  the  League  of  Nations  then  became  effective 
with  the  promulgation  of  the  peace  treaty,  and 
and  Nine-  the  Constitution  of  the  United  States,  whose 
Amendments  Provisi°ns  were  invoked  by  opponents  of  ratifica 
tion  in  America,  was  modified  by  the  Eighteenth 
and  Nineteenth  Amendments.  The  Sixteenth  and  Seven 
teenth  Amendments,  one  authorizing  the  levy  of  an  income 
tax  and  the  other  providing  for  the  direct  election  of  United 
States  Senators,  were  proclaimed  seven  years  earlier,  in 
the  opening  weeks  of  the  Wilson  Administration.  The  new 
amendments  established  prohibition  and  granted  full  suf 
frage  to  women.  Together  they  worked  a  greater  change 
in  the  purport  of  the  Federal  Constitution  than  had  been 
brought  about  by  all  the  preceding  amendments  since  its 
original  adoption. 

The  Eighteenth,  or  "dry"  Amendment,  went  into  effect 
on  the  same  day  that  the  Council  of  the  League  of  Nations 
held  its  first  session,  January  16,  — a  year  after  its  accept 
ance  by  the  last  of  the  thirty-six  States  whose  approval 
was  necessary  to  its  adoption.  When  the  amendment  was 
proposed  by  Congress,  many  States  were  already  dry  by 
their  own  enactment,  and  the  prolonged  fight  for  prohibi 
tion  had  been  taken  up  by  the  managers  of  industry  and  the 
leaders  of  the  South.  Since  1872  there  had  been  a  National 
Prohibition  Party,  with  a  ticket  in  the  field  every  four  years, 
and  for  a  generation  before  1872  the  temperance  movement 
had  flourished  in  local  and  spasmodic  waves.  War,  with 
the  need  for  conservation  of  grain  as  well  as  for  temperate 
labor,  accelerated  the  movement.  Under  the  provisions  of 
a  war-time  prohibition  act  of  November,  1918,  the  United 
States  was  made  dry  after  July  i,  1919,  for  the  duration  of 


THE  ELECTION  OF  1920  579 

the  war;  and  in  the  following  October  the  Volstead  Act  for 
the  enforcement  of  prohibition  became  a  law  over  the  veto 
of  the  President,  who  thought  the  justification  had  disap 
peared  with  the  cessation  of  fighting.  But  great  majorities 
in  both  houses  gave  evidence  of  the  satisfaction  of  the  peo 
ple  at  the  approach  of  prohibition,  by  whatever  means,  and 
when  the  amendment  came  into  effect  the  noisy  scolding  of 
the  wet  interests  had  no  great  influence. 

The  movement  for  woman  suffrage  attained  success  later 
in  1920.  Like  prohibition,  it  had  been  adopted  in  the 
Western  States  and  was  sweeping  toward  the  East.  The 
demand  for  sex  equality  that  Lucretia  Mott  and  Susan  B. 
Anthony  voiced  in  the  middle  of  the  century  gained  its 
first  victories  in  the  frontier  States  where  the  qualifications 
for  the  franchise  had  been  systematically  lowered  since  the 
first  migrations.  Anna  Howard  Shaw,  who  inherited  the 
leadership  of  Miss  Anthony,  died  within  a  few  days  of  the 
proposal  of  the  amendment  by  Congress,  in  1919,  but  lived 
long  enough  to  see  her  measure  approved  by  the  responsible 
leaders  of  all  parties  and  started  toward  a  sure  success. 
For  months,  during  the  crisis  of  the  war,  a  group  of  militant 
women  picketed  the  White  House  and  cast  what  discredit 
they  could  upon  the  President  for  his  failure  to  procure  the 
immediate  suffrage  they  demanded.  The  ratification  of 
the  Nineteenth  Amendment  took  only  a  year,  and  in  the 
spring  of  1920  there  was  a  scramble  among  the  leaders  of 
both  great  parties  to  make  it  possible  for  women  to  vote 
in  the  presidential  election.  The  amendment  was  pro 
claimed  in  August,  1920,  each  party  claiming  credit  for  the 
act. 

The  artificial  state  of  war,  prolonged  in  the  United  States 
by  the  failure  of  the  peace  treaty,  did  not  prevent  steps 
toward   the   restoration   of   normal   conditions.    Interna. 
The  series  of  loans,  by  which  the  United  States    tional 
supplemented  her  military  effort  in  the  war,  was 
stopped  with  nearly  all  the  authorized  ten  billion  dollars 
advanced  to  the  Allies.     "The  United  States  could  not,  if  it 
would,  assume  the  burdens  of  all  the  earth,"  said  Secretary 


58o     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

Houston  when  he  announced  that  loans  would  cease.     fi  J 
balance  of  trade  had  not  only  created  great  debts  owed  t 
the  United  States,  but  it  had  caused  alarming  decline  in 
foreign  exchange  that  acted  as  an  automatic  embargo  on  the 
American  export  trade.     On  February  4,  1920,  the  pound 
sterling  could  be  bought  in  New  York  for  $3.19  instead  of  its 
ordinary  $4.84;  and  French  and  Belgian  francs  fell  to  b< 
tween  seven  and  eight  cents,  while  the  German  mark,  under 
the  influence  of  defeat  as  well  as  balance  of  trade,  invited 
speculation  at  over  forty  to  the  dollar,   instead  of  four. 
After  February  the  foreign  condition  gradually  improved, 
as  Europe  got  again  to  work.      But  American  prices  re 
mained  at  the  peak  caused  by  the  various  forces  of  actual 
scarcity,  high  cost  of  labor,   impeded  transportation,  in 
flation  of  the  currency,  and  the  spendable  savings  of  citizens 
whose  Liberty  bonds  were  thrown  on  the  market  now  the 
emergency  was  over.      Retail  food  prices  averaged  207  in 
the  first  six  months  of  1920  as  against  146  in  1917,  and  la 
in  1913. 

The  continuance  of  high  prices  exasperated  citizens  who 
felt  that  they  were  in  some  way  the  fault  of  the  Administra 
tion,  and  gave  basis  for  the  renewed  demands  of  workers 
in  every  field  for  higher  pay.      In  the  schools  and  colleges, 
where  salaries  were  low  at   best,  a  fear  of  the  decay  of 
scholarship  and  instruction  inspired  a  general  effort  to  cor 
rect  the  pay  schedules.     The  railroad  workers,  whose  do 
mands  had  been  put  off  from  month  to  month,  renewed  thei 
pressure,  and  fought  the  plans  of  Congress  for  terminating 
the  Railroad  Administration. 

The  Plumb  plan  for  railroad  control  was  advanced 
the  unions  during  the  summer  of  1919,  and  contemplated  a 
Railroad         representation  of  the  workmen  upon  the  direc 
Control  Act    torates  of  the   lines.      Many  of  the  union  is 
hoped  that  Government  control  might  be  permanent,  an< 
might  develop  into  actual  Government  ownership,  bu 
obvious  impossibility  at  this  time  of  passing  any  law  f< 
tending  Government  activities  turned  the  movement  intc 
one  that  guaranteed  the  workers  a  share  in  the  manage 


VfP 
o 


120° 


100 


UNITED  STATES 
1920 


SCALE  OF  MILES 


0  100  200  300 

State  Capitals  shown  in  this  type  Denver 

Cities  of  100.000  and  over  shown  by  dot  • 

EXPLANATION    OF   SHADING 
]  Over  10,000  feet     |||||||||!||1|||||||  6,000  to  10.000  feet 


2.000  to  6.COO  feet 


100' 


Tropic  __qf_ 


THE  ELECTION  OF  1920  581 

ment.  Under  the  Railroad  Act  of  1918,  which  fixed  the 
terms  of  Government  control,  it  was  provided  that  the 
roads  must  be  returned  to  their  owners  twenty-one  months 
after  the  end  of  the  war.  Director-General  McAdoo  asked 
to  have  this  period  lengthened  in  order  to  have  an  oppor 
tunity  to  test  the  system  in  times  of  peace.  This  was  re 
fused  by  Congress,  which  seemed  indisposed  either  to  allow 
Government  control  or  to  turn  the  roads  back.  Under  the 
stimulus  of  presidential  threat  to  deliver  the  roads  to  their 
owners  at  the  earliest  date  unless  Congress  should  act, 
the  Esch-Cummins  Bill  was  passed  in  February,  for  the  re 
turn  of  the  roads  on  March  i,  1920.  The  Interstate  Com 
merce  Commission  was  given  large  new  powers  over  railroad 
finance,  and  a  Railroad  Labor  Board  was  created  to  ad 
just  wage  disputes.  This  body  granted  large  increases  in 
pay  during  the  next  summer,  and  adopted  a  policy  of  refus 
ing  to  confer  with  the  leaders  of  outlaw  strikes.  The  Inter 
state  Commerce  Commission  allowed  the  carriers  to  increase 
their  rates  in  order  to  earn  the  increased  pay.  Organized 
labor  in  general  opposed  the  Esch-Cummins  Act,  and  as 
sisted  in  defeating  Esch  himself  for  reelection  in  November. 
Before  the  return  of  the  railroads  was  accomplished,  the 
preliminaries  of  the  new  presidential  campaign  were  so 
far  advanced  that  all  public  acts  were  directly  Wiison  and 
affected  by  it.  It  was  the  wish  of  President  the  "solemn 

iTT'i  ,1  11-  •  11111  referendum 

Wilson  that  public  attention  should  be  kept 
fixed  upon  the  treaty  and  the  League  of  Nations,  making 
the  election  a  "solemn  referendum"  on  that  issue.  "The 
United  States  enjoyed  the  spiritual  leadership  of  the 
world,"  he  wrote,  "until  the  Senate  of  the  United  States 
failed  to  ratify  the  treaty  by  which  the  belligerent  nation^ 
sought  to  effect  the  settlements  for  which  they  had  fought 
throughout  the  war."  His  own  health  was  too  uncertain  to 
permit  him  to  take  any  active  part  in  the  struggle,  and  in  the 
absence  of  his  aggressive  leadership  his  party  ranged  in 
opinion  from  those  who  supported  his  views  to  those  who 
accepted  Bryan's  policy  of  ratification  with  any  amend 
ments  that  might  be  needed  to  secure  action,  and  even  to 


582     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

those  who  believed  with  Reed,  of  Missouri,  that  there 
should  be  no  league  at  all.  Among  the  Republicans  opin 
ion  was  equally  divided,  with  a  tendency  for  the  treaty  op 
ponents  to  receive  support  from  League  advocates  who 
thought  the  failure  of  the  treaty  due  to  the  stubbornness 
of  Wilson. 

In  this  uncertainty  the  candidacy  of  Herbert  Hoover 
had  an  immediate  appeal  when  his  friends  announced  it  in 
The  January.  As  a  mining  engineer,  living  much 

Hoover  outside  the  United  States,  Hoover  had  no  known 
political  affiliations.  The  Democratic  New 
York  World  supported  him  none  the  less,  as  did  the  liberal 
New  Republic,  the  Republican  Philadelphia  Public  Ledger, 
and  the  non-partisan  but  ubiquitous  Saturday  Evening  Post. 
His  supporters  came  largely  from  those  who  were  unor 
ganized  in  politics,  the  women  and  college  professors,  and 
business  men,  large  and  small.  He  appeared  to  represent  a 
wave  of  thought  that  was  tired  of  politicians  and  wanted 
the  National  Government  administered  upon  the  same  high 
and  impartial  ideals  that  had  made  the  Commission  for  the 
Relief  of  Belgium  an  international  triumph.  Moreover,  he 
wanted  a  League  of  Nations,  and  was  a  proper  continuator 
of  American  war  policies. 

The  Hoover  boom  came  to  nought.  Its  supporters  lacked 
cohesion  and  experience,  and  the  powerful  cement  that  comes 
from  wanting  something  for  themselves.  So  long  as  Hoover 
remained  outside  both  parties  he  could  expect  no  aid  from 
active  politicians.  So  soon  as  he  was  forced  to  admit  that 
it  was  the  Republican  nomination  he  desired,  he  lost  at 
once  the  support  of  such  Democrats  as  had  been  willing  to 
adopt  him.  The  Republican  leaders  did  not  want  him, 
as  they  had  not  wanted  Roosevelt  in  1900.  They  pre 
ferred  instead  some  one  in  harmony  with  the  senatorial 
associates  who  had  fought  the  treaty  under  the  leadership 
of  Lodge.  Instead  of  Hoover,  the  opponents  of  Wilson 
gathered  around  the  names  of  Leonard  Wood,  who  was 
supposed  to  embody  something  of  the  spirit  of  Roosevelt; 
Hiram  Johnson,  who  had  made  himselt  the  personification 


THE  ELECTION  OF  1920  583 

of  irreconcilable  opposition  to  any  league;  or  Governor 
Frank  O.  Lowden,  of  Illinois,  whose  appeal  was  that  of  a 
business  man  turned  into  an  admirable  executive.  The 
Republican  Party,  still  divided  as  in  1916,  needed  a  candi 
date  who  could  be  supported  by  opponents  of  the  League  as 
well  as  friends,  by  German-Americans  who  hated  the  treaty 
and  Irish-Americans  who  hated  England,  by  the  remnants 
of  the  Roosevelt  Progressives  and  the  survivors  of  the  "Old 
Guard"  who  wanted  to  get  back  to  the  conditions  of  1896. 

"Any  good  republican  can  be  nominated  for  president 
and  can  defeat  any  democrat,"  said  Senator  Boies  Penrose, 
who  knew  as  much  as  any  one  about  the  organi-  Hardjng 
zation  of  the  party.  By  the  time  the  convention  and 
met  in  Chicago  in  June,  Hoover  was  out  of  the 
running,  Wood  and  Lowden  were  weakened  by  revelations 
as  to  the  large  funds  expended  by  their  admirers  to  pro 
cure  their  nomination,  and  Johnson  was  too  outspoken  to 
meet  the  party  need.  Lodge,  the  temporary  chairman,  in 
his  keynote  speech,  urged  the  ousting  of  the  Wilson  dynasty 
and  the  defeat  of  the  Wilson  league.  The  platform,  adopted 
before  the  candidate  was  chosen,  was  a  compromise  designed 
to  hold  the  Johnson  faction  in  the  party.  The  candidate, 
Senator  \Varren  G.  Harding,  of  Ohio,  was  a  reservationist 
upon  the  treaty,  a  new  member  of  the  Senate,  steady,  well- 
liked,  and  conciliatory.  His  companion  on  the  ticket  was 
Governor  Calvin  Coolidge,  of  Massachusetts,  whose  behav 
ior  in  the  Boston  policemen's  strike  had  identified  him  with 
the  maintenance  of  law  and  order. 

Congress  brought  its  regular  session  to  a  close  a  few  days 
before  the  Republican  Convention  met.  It  had  failed  to 
end  the  state  of  war.  On  March  19  the  treaty  had  been 
defeated  for  the  second  time,  and  on  May  27  Wilson  had 
vetoed  a  joint  resolution  repealing  the  war  declaration. 
The  session  had  done  less  in  reconstruction  than  the  Repub 
lican  advocates  had  promised  in  the  campaign  of  1918,  and 
had  spent  months  of  time  in  patient  though  fruitless  search 
for  official  misconduct  in  the  war.  Since  March  it  had 
engaged  in  a  naval  investigation  growing  out  of  criticisms 


584     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

advanced  by  Sims.  The  investigation  of  the  War  Depart 
ment,  begun  a  year  earlier,  brought  fprth  much  testimony 
to  the  unreadiness  of  the  country  when  war  came,  and 
to  the  blundering  and  waste  that  accompanied  the  hur 
ried  mobilization  of  industry  and  society.  But  no  scandals 
were  uncovered  equal  to  those  that  followed  the  war  with 
Spain.  Appropriations  were  pared  down  to  bring  expendi 
tures  to  a  peace  basis,  and  at  the  very  end  of  the  session 
laws  were  approved  relating  to  the  army  and  the  merchant 
marine. 

The  Army  Act  of  June  4,  1920,  revised  the  National 
Defense  Act  of  1916  in  the  light  of  the  experience  of  the 
The  Army  years  of  war.  It  authorized  a  strength  of  about 
Act,  1920  three  hundred  thousand  for  the  regular  army, 
and  left  the  organization  of  the  forces  largely  in  the  hands  of 
the  War  Department.  The  General  Staff  was  directed  to 
confine  itself  more  strictly  to  coordination  than  had  been 
the  practice  during  the  war,  but  was  left  large  enough  to 
operate,  and  able  to  conduct  the  various  schemes  of  pro 
fessional  education  that  had  been  found  indispensable  in 
the  A.E.F.  The  post-graduate  courses  developed  in  the 
Roosevelt-Root  administration  of  the  army  had  justified 
themselves,  and  were  now  made  the  basis  of  advancement 
for  all  officers.  For  the  enlisted  men  new  schemes  of  educa 
tion  and  specialized  training  were  provided.  Compulsory 
service  or  training  in  peace-time  failed  to  find  a  majority. 
The  National  Guard  was  continued,  but  in  closer  and  more 
organic  relations  with  the  regular  army  than  ever  before. 
And  the  three  field  armies,  which  the  armistice  had  found  m 
Germany,  were  perpetuated  in  a  new  military  arrangement 
for  the  United  States  under  which  the  old  departments  were 
to  disappear. 

The  Jones  Merchant  Marine  Act,  passed  June  5,  1920, 
rearranged  the  powers  of  the  United  States  Shipping  Board 
The  Jones  anc^  withdrew  many  of  the  emergency  pow- 
Merchant  ers  granted  for  the  time  of  war.  It  left  the 

Marine  Act  n  .  .      f    A.       01  . 

emergency  fleet  at  the  control  of  the  Shipping 
Board,  and  made  provision  for  the  encouragement  of  the 


THE  ELECTION  OF  1920  585 

carriage  of  American  freights  in  American  vessels.  In  cer 
tain  of  its  provisions,  which  Wilson  declined  to  enforce  on 
the  ground  that  they  went  beyond  the  capacity  of  Congress, 
it  ran  counter  to  the  treaty  agreements  existing  with  most 
of  the  nations  having  shipping  in  American  ports.  In  the 
same  spirit  the  Republican  Convention  adopted  a  plank 
reopening  the  Panama  Canal  tolls  controversy,  and  favoring 
the  repeal  of  the  law  secured  by  President  Wilson  in  1914 
whereby  the  merchant  ships  of  all  nations  were  put  upon  an 
even  footing. 

The  Democratic  Administration  was  under  continuous 
attack  by  the  Republican  majorities  in  both  houses  of  Con 
gress,  and  only  occasionally  did  President  Wilson  The  £>emo_ 
intervene  openly  from  his  seclusion  in  the  White  cratic 
House.  He  announced  no  choice  for  his  succes 
sor,  but  it  was  believed  that  William  G.  McAdoo  would  be  a 
welcome  selection.  The  criticism  of  McAdoo  as  "son-in- 
law"  and  "crown  prince"  weakened  his  availability  as  a 
candidate,  and  although  many  delegates  to  the  convention 
were  in  favor  of  him  he  did  not  at  any  time  become  more 
than  a  receptive  candidate.  A.  Mitchell  Palmer  was  an 
aggressive  aspirant  for  the  nomination.  As  Alien  Property 
Custodian  during  the  war,  and  as  Attorney-General  after 
it,  he  had  gained  much  prominence.  Under  his  direction 
the  federal  anti-red  campaign  was  waged,  and  an  attack 
was  made  upon  the  profiteers.  He  was  opposed  by  most  of 
the  radical  Democrats  on  the  ground  that  he  had  gone  be 
yond  reasonable  limits  in  the  restriction  of  freedom  of  speech 
and  opinion.  Outside  the  Administration  group  were  Gov 
ernor  Edwards,  of  New  Jersey,  with  aspirations  founded 
upon  his  defense  of  "personal  liberty"  in  his  opposition  to 
the  Eighteenth  Amendment,  and  Governor  James  D.  Cox, 
of  Ohio,  who  had  the  distinction  of  three  elections  to  that 
office  in  a  doubtful  State. 

William  J.  Bryan  was  again  a  leading  figure  at  the  Demo 
cratic  Convention,  held  in  San  Francisco  at  the  end  of  June; 
not  as  a  candidate,  but  as  the  champion  of  peace  and  pro 
hibition.  He  failed  to  secure  action  for  the  latter  cause,  for 


586     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

this  convention,  like  the  Republican,  treated  the  "dry" 
amendment  as  a  closed  issue  and  said  nothing  to  stir  up 
either  side  of  the  long  fight.  Ireland  was  present  at  San 
Francisco,  as  it  had  been  at  Chicago,  demanding  planks  in 
support  of  the  pretensions  of  the  Sinn  Fein  Republic  to 
independence.  Since  the  Easter  revolt  of  1916  the  Irish  in 
dependents  had  organized  what  they  claimed  to  be  a  govern 
ment  and  had  kept  the  island  in  a  state  of  chronic  disorder. 
American  Irishmen,  headed  by  Frank  Walsh  and  Governor 
Dunne,  had  presented  the  claims  of  their  former  country 
to  the  "Big  Four"  at  Paris,  without  avail;  and  Eamonn 
De  Valera,  as  president  of  the  revolutionary  government, 
maintained  American  headquarters  and  supervised  the  sale 
of  Irish  bonds.  On  March  18,  1920,  the  Senate  passed  a 
resolution  of  sympathy  with  Ireland;  and  the  organized 
Irish  devoted  themselves  to  the  defeat  of  the  peace  treaty 
because  of  its  failure  to  recognize  their  self-determination. 
The  threat  to  swing  the  usual  Irish  Democratic  vote  to 
Harding  resembled  the  hyphenated  threat  to  swing  the 
German  vote  to  Hughes  in  1916.  The  Democratic  platform 
included  a  resolution  of  sympathy  with  the  Irish  cause. 

The  deadlock  of  the  Democratic  Convention  over  the 
leading  candidates  lasted  longer  than  it  had  done  at  Chi- 
Cox  and  cago.  In  each  case  no  one  of  the  leaders  could 
command  the  support  of  the  tested  professional 
politicians  of  the  party;  and  as  the  Republican  Senators 
swung  to  Harding  at  the  end,  so  the  Democratic  city  poli 
ticians  swung  the  convention  to  Cox  on  the  forty-fourth 
ballot,  and  gave  him  the  two  thirds  needful  for  a  nomina 
tion.  Franklin  D.  Roosevelt,  Assistant  Secretary  of  the 
Navy,  was  named  for  Vice-President. 

The  passions  aroused  in  the  canvass  of  1920  were  in 
spired  less  by  the  candidates  than  by  the  idea  of  punish- 
Third-party  ing  either  the  President  for  his  arrogance  or  the 
movements  Senate  for  its  defeat  of  the  treaty.  The  hopes 
of  third-party  reformers  were  aroused  by  the  apathy  of  the 
campaign.  An  attempt  was  made  in  July,  by  a  commit 
tee  of  forty-eight  progressives,  to  unite  the  labor  parties, 


THE  ELECTION  OF  1920  587 

the  Non-Partisan  League,  and  all  the  other  discontented 
elements  in  a  new  party  of  reform.  The  Socialists  had 
already  nominated  Eugene  V.  Debs  for  the  fifth  time,  al 
though  he  was  now  behind  the  bars  in  the  Atlanta  peniten 
tiary.  The  other  dissenting  groups  proved  non-fusible ;  the 
farmers  captured  the  convention  of  the  "  Forty-Eighters  " 
and  made  so  radical  a  platform  that  most  of  the  callers  of 
the  convention  repudiated  the  result.  La  Follette  declined 
to  accept  a  nomination  from  the  group,  and  P.  P.  Christen- 
son,  of  Utah,  headed  their  ticket. 

Labor  continued  uneasy  during  the  summer  of  1920, 
with  many  outlaw  strikes,  which  labor  leaders  could  not 
or  would  not  restrain.  Farmers  were  in  protest  Business 
against  the  fall  of  prices  that  became  visible  conditions 
after  July.  To  them  the  conduct  of  the  Federal 
Reserve  Board  in  raising  the  discount  rate,  and  in  refusing 
credit  to  borrowers  who  wanted  it  for  the  purpose  of  hoard 
ing  necessities  for  a  higher  price,  was  a  sort  of  treason.  But 
the  Federal  Reserve  Board  justified  its  creation  by  prevent 
ing  panic  as  prices  started  back  to  normal.  Sugar,  which 
had  been  extensively  hoarded,  dropped  from  thirty-five  to 
under  ten  cents  per  pound.  In  the  early  summer  the  textile 
mills  noted  a  decline  in  orders  and  laid  off  hands.  When 
Henry  Ford  cut  his  prices  to  a  pre-war  basis  in  the  autumn 
there  was  no  resulting  crisis,  although  the  act  was  generally 
accepted  as  proof  of  the  post-war  price  decline. 

The  debate  of  1920  centered  upon  the  League  of  Nations, 
but  with  a  majority  of  voters  determined  to  vote  without 
reference  to  its  logic.  Cox  supported  the  League  with  en 
thusiasm,  visiting  nearly  every  State.  Harding,  speak 
ing  generally  from  his  front  porch  in  manner  reminiscent 
of  the  campaign  of  1896,  varied  his  emphasis  from  day  to 
day  in  the  determination  not  to  offend  beyond  recall  either 
Root  and  Taft  who  wanted  the  League,  or  Borah  and  John 
son  to  whom  it  was  anathema.  But  whatever  he  said,  the 
underlying  current  was  that  of  the  majority  party  deter 
mined  to  return  to  power  after  two  administrations  of  self- 
incurred  defeat.  In  his  favor  were  the  habitual  Republi- 


588     RECENT  HISTORY  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 

can  votes,  the  anti-Wilson  votes,  and  the  support  of  the 
multitude  of  Americans  who  had  chafed  under  the  unusual 
restrictions  and  penetrating  taxation  of  the  World  War. 

Harding  and  Coolidge  were  elected  in  November,  with 
a  popular  plurality  of  6,998,964  over  Cox  and  Roosevelt, 
Election  with  every  Northern  State  supporting  them,  and 
ofjiarding  Wjtj1  Arizona,  New  Mexico,  Oklahoma,  Tennes 
see,  and  all  the  border  States,  except  Kentucky  and  Vir 
ginia,  in  the  Republican  column.  Debs  ran  third,  but  a 
better  third  than  ever  because  of  the  radical  reaction  against 
war  restraint  and  the  protest  against  suppression  of  opinion. 
His  votes  measure  in  part  the  lack  of  interest  in  the  two 
great  parties.  In  both  houses  of  Congress  the  Republican 
majorities  were  greatly  increased.  Like  the  Civil  War,  but 
for  different  reasons,  the  World  War  had  driven  the  Dem 
ocratic  Party  out  of  power,  and  left  the  future,  whose  out 
lines  were  but  faintly  visible,  in  the  hands  of  the  party  01 
the  North  and  West. 

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL  NOTE 

The  best  of  the  biographies  read  during  the  campaign  is  William  E. 
Dodd,  Woodrow  Wilson  and  his  Work  (1920) ;  other  books  having  a  bearing 
on  the  election  are  Roger  W.  Babson,  Cox  —  The  Man  (1920);  James  M. 
Beck,  The  Passing  of  the  New  Freedom  (1920);  Walter  Lippmann,  Liberty 
and  the  News  (1920);  and  David  Karsner,  Debs:  His  Authorized  Life  and 
Letters  (1920).  A  new  survey  of  the  American  system  at  the  close  of  the 
war  is  Everett  Kimball,  The  National  Government  of  the  United  States 
(1920).  Much  miscellaneous  data  may  be  culled  from  "  Presidential  Cam 
paign  Expenses"  (Hearing  pursuant  to  Sen.  Res.  357,  66th  Cong.,  2d 
Sess.),  and  "Victor  L.  Berger"  (Hearings  under  House  Res.  6,  66th  Cong., 
1st  Sess.). 


INDEX 


Abbott,  Lyman,  25 

"A.  B.  C."  Powers,  427 

Adams,  Henry,  33 

Adams,  Henry  Carter,  330 

Adamson  Law,  454,  456,  517,  573 

Addams,  Jane,  133,  400,  416,  445 

Adventures  o/  Huckleberry  Finn,  The,  30 

Adventures  of  Tom  Sawyer,  28 

Agriculture,  Department  of,  114 

Agricultural  colleges,  8 

Agricultural  machinery,  improved,  69 

Aguinaldo,  Ernilio,  242,  259,  272,  289,  420 

Air  Service,  520. 

Aircraft  Production  Board,  484,  485 

Aisne  River,  548 

Alaska,  15,  379 

Aldrich,  Senator,  328,  367 

Aldrich,  Thomas  Bailey,  27 

Aldrich  Monetary  Commission,  408 

Aldrich- Vreeland  Act,  335,  409 

Algeciras  Conference,  347 

Alger,  Russell  A.,  139,  227,  243 

Alien  and  Sedition  Acts  of  1798, 464 

Alien  Deportation  Act,  576" " 

Alien  Property  Custodian,  503 

Allenby,  General,  551 

Allied  Maritime  Transport  Council,  530 

Allied  Naval  Council,  530 

Allied  offensives,  549 

Allies  Purchasing  Commission,  526 

Allison,  Senator,  139 

Altgeld,  John  P.,  200,  204 

Amalgamated  Association  of  Iron  and  Steel 
Workers,  199,  281 

Amateur  sports,  122 

Amendments  to  the  Constitution,  Civil  War, 
71,  180;  sixteenth,  407,  578;  seventeenth, 
376,  578;  eighteenth,  578;  nineteenth,  579 

America's  Cup,  the,  119 

American,  The,  30 

American  Alliance  for  Labor  and  Democracy, 
5io 

American  base  in  France,  491 

American  Commission  to  Negotiate  Peace, 
557 

American  Commonwealth,  386,  399 

American  Defense  Society,  443 

American  Expeditionary  Force,  491,  543 

American  Federationist,  458 

American  Federation  of  Labor,  127,  129,  131, 
281,  360,  45.8,  479,  5io,  534,  575 

American  foreign  policy,  54 

American  Historical  Association,  33 

American  Jockey  Club,  119 

American  League  to  Limit  Armaments,  445 

American  Legion,  563 

American  literature  in  the  nineteenth  cen 
tury,  27 

American  neutrality,  434 

American  Neutrality  League,  470 

American  peace  terms  inquiry  of  1916,  468 

American  Protective  League,  498 


American  Purchasing  Commission  for  the 

Allies,  527 

American  Red  Cross,  509 
American  Rights  Committee,  443 
American  Socialist,  459 
American  system,  Clay's,  136,  215 
American  troops,  quality  of,  544 
"American  Truth  Society,"  386,  437 
American  Union,  68 

American  Union  against  Militarism,  445,  470 
Americanization,  463.  See  also  Immigration 

and  Naturalization 
Amundsen,  Roald,  391 
"Ananias  Club,"  329 
Anarchy  and  socialism,  128 
Anthony,  Susan  B.,  579 
Anthracite  coal  strike,  1902, 303 
Anti-Conscription  League,  470 
Anti-imperialism,  260,  269 
Anti-monopoly  movement,  151 
Anti-Rebate  Act,  301 
Anti-Trust  Bill,  Sherman,  152 
Anti-trust  legislation,  300,  325,  437;  policies, 

413 

Anti-war  agitation,  470,  472 

Arbitration  of  international  disputes,  387; 
with  Great  Britain,  211,  394,  430 

Arbitration  treaties,  430.  See  also  Peace 
Treaties, 

Arc  light,  perfected,  69 

Argonne,  Forest,  548 

Arizona,  admission  of,  378 

Armed  merchant  ships,  471 

Armistice,  256 

Armstrong  Committee  of  New  York  Legis 
lature,  357 

Army,  U.  S.,  health  of,  255;  in  1894,  202 

Army  Act  of  1916.  517;  of  1920,  584 

Army  Appropriation  Bill,  450 

Army  bills,  deadlock  over,  14 

Army  divisions  of  1917,  494 

Army  legislation,  243 

Army  reduction,  urged  by  the  South,  17 

Army  War  College,  290 

Arnold,  Matthew,  32 

Arthur,  Chester  A.,  47,  54 ;  Congressional 
elections  of  1882,  76  ;  tariff  revision,  77  ; 
significant  political  acts  of  his  administra 
tion,  82 

Arthur,  P.  M.,  21 

Article  X,  570 

Assassination  of  Archduke  Francis  Ferdi 
nand,  432 

Astor,  John  Jacob,  72 

Astor,  William  Waldorf,  183 

Atchison,  Topeka  and  Santa  FC"  Railroad,  38, 
57,  58,  108,  156,  294,  378 

Athenaum,  The,  30 

Atkinson,  Edward,  79 

Atlantic  and  Pacific  Railroad,  57,  102;  tele 
graph,  68 

Atlantic  City,  74 


590 


INDEX 


Atlantic  fleet,  the,  245 

Atlantic  Monthly,  26,  27,  28,  314 

Australian  ballot,  144 

Austria,  551 

Aviation,  390 

Aviation  Section  of  the  Signal  Corps,  485 

Baer,  George  F.,  303 

Baer,  John  M.,  465 

Baker,  Newton  D.,  450,  519,  557 

Balfpur,  A.  J.,  490 

Ballinger,  Richard  A.,  370,  379 

Ballot,  secret,  143 

Baltimore  and  Ohio  Railroad,  strike  of  1877, 
18,  22;  an  oil  road,  67,  478 

Bancroft,  George,  29,  33 

Barker,  Wharton,  268,  360 

Barnard,  F.  A.  P.,  7 

Barnum,  P.  T.,  118 

Barry,  John,  453 

Bartholdt,  Richard,  447 

Baruch,  Bernard  M.,  484,  514,  537,  540 

Baseball,  121 

Bates,  John  C.,  345 

Battle  of  the  Marne,  in  1914,  467 

Battle-fleet,  cruise  of,  343 

Battleships  and  cruisers,  early  modern, 
238 

Battles  and  Leaders  of  the  Civil  War,  314 

Bayard,  Thomas  F.,  Secretary  of  State,  96, 
226 

Belgium,  invasion  of,  434,  474 

Bell,  Alexander  Graham,  68 

Bell,  J.  Franklin,  345 

Bellamy,  Edward,  131,  152,267 

Belleau  Wood,  548 

Ben  Hur,  30 

Benedict  XV,  522 

Benson,  Allen,  459 

Benson,  William  S.,  344 

Berger,  Victor  L.,  389,  576 

"Berlin  to  Bagdad,"  467 

Beveridge,  Albert  J.,  373 

Bicycle,  the,  123 

Big  business,  attack  upon,  312 

"Big  Four,"  560,  586 

"Big  Stick,"  The,  383 

Biglow  Papers,  The,  32 

Bimetallism,  35, 170, 265.  See  also  Free  Silver, 
and  Silver 

Elaine,  James  G.,  criticizes  Hayes'  policies,  3; 
upon  home  rule  in  the  South,  6;  a  leader  of 
the  Half-Breed  faction  of  the  Republicans, 
46;  becomes  Garfield's  Secretary  of  State, 
51;  candidate  for  presidential  nomination, 
87;  denounces  free  trade,  136;  eliminated 
from  campaign  for  nomination,  138;  upon 
trade  relations  with  South  America,  149; 
relations  with  President  Harrison,  177, 
403;  retirement  from  Cabinet  and  death, 
178;  views  upon  protective  tariff,  366 

Bland-Allison  Act,  1878,  39,  44,  103,  150, 
184, 190 

Bleriot,  Louis,  390 

Bliss,  Tasker  H.,  290, 489,  540,  558 

"Blocks  of  five,"  142 

Bolsheviki,  523;  victory,  530 

Bolshevism,  475 

Bolshevist  government,  561 

Bond  issue,  of  1894,  207 


Book-Buyer,  The,  27 

Bookman,  The,  27 

Boone  and  Crockett  Club,  117,  276 

Borah,  William  E.,  376,  461,  569,  570,  572, 
587 

Boss  rule,  in  cities,  230 

Boston  University,  8 

Bourne,  Jonathan,  393 

"Boxer"  rebellion  in  China,  284 

Boxing,  1 20 

Boy-Ed,  Captain,  448 

Brady,  Thomas  J.,  63 

Bragg,  General,  93 

Brandegee,  Frank  B.,  570 

Brandeis,  Louis,  413,  458 

Breach  with  Germany,  470 

Bread-Winners,  The,  259 

Brest-Litovsk  Peace,  524 

Brewster,  Benjamin  Harrison,  64 

Brice,  Calvin,  208 

Bridges,  use  of  steel  in  constructing,  58 

Brinton,  General,  23 

Bristow,  Senator,  376 

British  arbitration,  Lord  Bryce's  efforts 
toward,  386 

British  Board  of  Agriculture,  483 

British  Labor  Manifesto,  524 

British  Munitions  Ministry,  484 

Brookings,  Robert  S.,  538 

Brooklyn  Bridge,  70 

Brotherhood  of  Locomotive  Engineers,  19, 21 

Brotherhood  of  the  Footboard,  21 

Brown  University,  7 

Bryan,  William  Jennings,  beaten  in  the 
Democratic  Convention,  193;  advocates 
an  income  tax,  209;  nominated  for  Presi 
dent,  1896,  220;  supports  free  silver,  220; 
against  imperialism,  262;  nominated  for 
President,  1900,  268;  views  upon  constitu 
tion  of  Oklahoma,  333;  in  control  of  the 
Democratic  convention,  359,  400;  Wilson's 
opinion  of,  403;  Secretary  of  State  under 
President  Wilson,  421,  423;  letter  upon 
American  neutrality,  447;  against  war 
with  Germany,  470;  opposes  "solemn 
referendum  "  upon  treaty,  572 ;  for  ratifica 
tion  of  treaty  without  amendment,  581; 
a  leading  figure  at  Democratic  convention, 
1920,  585 

Bryce,  James,  32,  386 

Bryn  Mawr  College,  9 

Buck  Stove  and  Range  Case,  361 

Buckner,  Simon  B.,  222 

Buenz,  448 

"Buffalo  Bill"  (William  F.  Cody),  117 

Bulgaria,  555 

Bull  moose  emblem,  400 

Bunau-Varilla,  351 

Buntline,  Ned,  30 

Bureau  of  Aircraft  Production,  520 

Bureau  of  Animal  Husbandry,  331 

Bureau  of  Animal  Industry,  114 

Bureau  of  Car  Service,  517 

Bureau  of  Corporations,  301,  325,  338 

Bureau  of  Immigration,  325,  418 

Bureau  of  Labor,  127,  325,  415 

Bureau  of  Mines,  341,  378,  505 

Bureau  of  Naval  Operations,  344 

Bureau  of  War  Risk  Insurance,  438,  499 

Burlington  Railroad,  156,  295 


INDEX 


591 


Burrows,  Julius  C.,  147,  206,  243 

Business,  and  politics,  265,  587;  depression 

in,  after  1884,  130:  supervision  of,  342; 

of  government,  changes  and  growth,  332 
Butler,  Gen.  B.  F  ,  43,  86,  94 
Butler.  Nicholas  Murray,  321,  402 

Cabinet,  Arthur's,  54;  Cleveland's,  96,  182; 

Garfield's,  51;  Harrison's,  145;  Hayes's,  2,3; 

McKinley's,  225;  Roosevelt's,  276;  Taft's, 

365;  Wilson's,  403 
Cable,  George  W.,  31 
Call,  the  New  York,  360 
Cambon,  Jules,  256 
Camera,  development  of,  69 
Cameron,  Don,  2,  3,  264 
Cameron,  Simon,  2,  3 
Campaign  funds,  charges  of  blackmail   in, 

310 
Campaign  of  1876, 2;  of  1880,  49;  of  1884,  86; 

of  1888,  138;  of  1892,  174;  of  1896,  216; 

of  1900,  268;  of  1904,  308;  of  1908,  356; 

of  1912,  396;  of  1916,  452;  of  1920,  582. 
Canada,  14,  15 

Canadian  fisheries  dispute,  385 
Canadian  Pacific  Railroad,  107 
Canadian  reciprocity,  389 
Canal  Act  of  1912,  428 
Canal  Zone,  383.     See  also  Panama 
Cannon,  Joseph  G.,  146,  307,  355,  369,  373 
Cantigny,  545 
Cantonments,  496 
Cape  May,  74 
Capital  and  Labor,  enmity  between,  Horace 

Greeley's  comment,  20;  struggles  between, 

280.    See    also    American    Federation    of 

Labor,  and  Labor 
Carey,  Gen.  Sam  F.,  42 
Caribbean  Sea,  431 
Carleton  College,  8 

Carlisle,  John  G.,  86,  96,  137,  182,  184 
Carnegie,  Andrew,  73,  151,  197,  296,  320 
Carnegie  Corporation,  320 
Carnegie     Endowment     for     International 

Peace,  320 

Carnegie  Foundation,  320 
Carnegie  Institution,  320 
Carnegie  Steel  Company,  199 
Carranza,  Venustiano,  425,  427 
Carter,  Nick,  30 
Cattle  Kings,  106 
Censorship  during  World  War,  436 
Centennial  Exposition,  the,  33 
Central  American  relations,  430 
Central  American  Supreme  Court,  431 
Central  Pacific  Railroad,  58,  293 
Central  Powers  collapse,  552 
Century  Magazine,  27,  105,  143,  227,  314 
Cervera,  Admiral,  245,  254 
Chaff ee,  Gen.  Adna  R.,  245,  284,  345 
Chamberlain,  David  H.,  4 
Chamberlain,  Senator  G.  E.,  449,  519,  537 
Chandler,  William  E.,  43 
Chandler,  Zachary,  2,  49 
Charity,  new  theory  of,  134 
Chateau-Thierry,  547,  548 
Chemical  Warfare  Service,  520 
ChSradame,  Andre",  467 
Chicago,  Burlington  and  Quincy  Railroad, 

60,  295,  326 


Chicago  stockyards,  108 

Chief  Joseph,  18 

Child  labor,  416 

Children's  Bureau,  415,  535 

Chile,  ultimatum  to,  176 

China,  283,  346,  568 

Chinese  Exclusion  Bill,  vetoed  by  Arthur, 
82 

Choate,  Joseph  H.,  348 

Christenson,  P.  P.,  587 

Christian  Union,  The,  25,  182,  319 

Churchill,  Winston,  315 

Cienfuegos,  247 

City  life  problems,  132,  182 

City  political  organizations,  132,  230 

Civil  government  in  the  Philippines,  289 

Civil  Rights  Cases  of  1884,  71 

Civil  Service  Commission,  141,  177 

Civil  service  reform,  82 

Civil  War  pensions,  97 

Clark,  Champ,  388,  398,  400 

Clarke,  John  H.,  458 

Class  interests,  194 

Clayton  Anti-Trust  Law,  414,  437 

Clay  ton- Bulwer  Treaty,  54,  96,  285 

Clemens,  Samuel  Langhorne,  26,  69,  339 

Clermont,  390 

Cleveland,  Grover,  nominated  for  Governor 
of  New  York,  76;  nominated  for  President, 
92;  elected,  95;  views  upon  the  tariff,  135, 
178;  defeated  by  Harrison,  142;  second 
election  as  President,  174,  181;  considered 
as  Democratic  candidate  against  Roose 
velt,  310;  death,  359;  unsuccessful  efforts 
for  arbitration  treaty  with  Great  Britain, 
386;  intervention  in  Venezuela,  426 

Closure  rule,  473 

Coal  strike  of  1902,  280,  303;  of  1919,  575 

Coblenz,  554 

Co-education,  10 

Coercion  Act,  of  1881,  89 

Coeur  d'Alene,  Miners'  strike  at,  461 

Coffin,  Howard  E.    484 

Coinage  laws  revised,  36 

Coinage  planks  in  party  platforms,  218 

College  education,  decline  in  middle  of  nine 
teenth  century,  7 

Collegiate  Alumnae,  Association  of,  10 

Collier's  Weekly,  315,  370 

Collins,  Patrick  A.,  138 

Cologne,  554 

Colombia,  Republic  of,  349,  385,  426 

Colonial  system,  no  desire  for,  259 

Columbia  University,  7,  321 

Commerce  and  Labor,  Department  of,  301 

Commercial,  the  Cincinnati,  42 

Commercial  and  Financial  Chronicle,  39 

Commission  for  the  Relief  of  Belgium,  436, 
483,  582 

Commission  form  of  government,  305 

Commission  on  the  League  of  Nations,  560 

Commissioner  of  Labor,  127 

Commissioner  of  Pensions,  98 

Committee  on  Foreign  Relations,  571 

Committee  on  Public  Information,  480,  498, 
509,  529 

Commoner,  419 

Commonwealth,  Topeka,  104 

Communist  Party,  576 

Coney  Island,  74 


592 


INDEX 


Confidence  in  stability  and  credit  of  govern 
ment  restored,  56 

Congestion  in  cities,  how  inventions  in 
creased,  70 

Congestion  of  transport,  516 

Congress,  Fifty-First,  145;  Fifty -Second,  192 ; 
Fifty -Third,  209;  Fifty-Fourth,  215;  Fifty- 
Fifth,  227;  Fifty-Sixth,  265;  Fifty-Seventh. 
306;  Fifty-Eighth,  328;  Fifty-Ninth,  337; 
Sixtieth,  354;  Sixty-First,  364;  Sixty-Sec 
ond,  381;  Sixty-Third,  413;  Sixty-Fourth, 
438;  Sixty-Fifth,  476,  564;  war  session  of 
1917,  476;  Sixty-Sixth,  571;  treaty  session 
of,  57i; 

Congressional  elections  of  1882,  76;  of  1898, 
260;  of  1902,  304;  of  1918,  555 

Congressional  Globe,  the,  90 

Congressional  Government,  34,  399 

Congressional  Record,  569 

Coniston,  315 

Conkling,  Roscoe,  2,  3,  46,  52 

Conservation  of  national  resources,  335;  con 
ference,  340,  369,  378,  512 

Control  of  Credit,  409 

Convention  System,  397 

Cooke,  Jay,  59,  188 

Cooley,  Thomas  M.,  114,  330 

Coolidge,  Calvin,  575,  583,  588 

Cooper,  James  Fenimore,  116 

Cooper,  Peter,  42 

Cooperation  between  army  and  navy,  in  the 
war  with  Spain,  249 

Cornell,  Alonzo,  47 

Cornell,  Ezra,  8 

Corporation  activities,  extension  of,  280 

Corporation  incomes,  tax  on,  368 

Corrupt  Practices  Act,  393 

Cortelyou,  George  B.,  301 

Cosmopolitan  Magazine,  314 

Costa  Rica,  431 

Cotton  States'  Exposition,  71 

Council  of  Four,  560  /       V 

Council  of  National  Defense,  450,  457,  478, 
483,  484,  489,  505,  509,  513,  520,  562 

Council  of  Ten,  560 

Council  of  the  League  of  Nations,  568,  571 

Courier-Journal,  Louisville,  377 

Court,  in  American  system  of  government,  201 

Cox,  James  D,,  585 

"  Coxey's  Army,"  205 

Crane,  Senator  Murray,  369 

Credit  system,  of  the  South,  71 

Creel,  George,  480 

Cricket,  122 

"Crime  of  1873,"  the,  37 

Cripple  Creek,  miners'  strike  at,  280,  461 

Crisp,  Charles  F.,  175,  192 

Critic,  The,  27 

Croker,  Richard,  265 

Croquet,  123 

Cuba,  233,  346,  358,  384 

Cuban  coasts,  patrol  of,  246 

Cuban  constitutional  convention,  289 

Cuban  independence,  288 

Ciiban  junta  in  New  York,  235 

Cullom,  Shelby  M.,  112,  181 

Cummins,  Albert  B.,  306,  373,  380 

Currency  Act  of  1900,  266,  334 

Current  Literature,  27 

Curtis,  George  W.,  84, 92, 136 


Custer   General   17 

Cycles  of  prosperity  and  panic,  187 

Czernin.  Count,  525 
^p 

Daily  Mail,  London,  233 

Dakota  Territory,  38;  division  into  states, 
158 

Daniels,  Josephus,  403,  421,  451 

Dawes  Act,  162 

Day,  William  R.,  226,  258 

Debs,  Eugene  V.,  200,  267,  311,  360,  402, 
587,  588 

Declaration  of  London,  349,  439 

Declaration  of  war  against  Germany,  476 

Delaware,  Lackawanna  and  Western  Rail 
road,  strike  of  1877,  23 ;  an  oil  road,  67 

De  Lima  vs.  Bidwell,  288 

Demobilization  in  America,  562 

Democracy  in  America,  386 

Democratic  governments  in  the  South,  up 
held  by  local  public  opinion,  5 

Demonetization  of  silver,  175 

Denman,  William,  482 

Denominational  colleges,  8 

Denver  and  Rio  Grande  Railroad,  38,  60 

Dependents'  Pension  Bill,  150 

Depew,  Chauncey  M.,  137,  139,  153 

Depression,  191,  195 

De  Valera,  Eamonn,  586 

Devens,  Charles  E.,  Attorney-General,  2 

Dewey,   George,  239,  248,  287,  422 

Dial,  The,  27 

Diaz,  Porfirio,  provisional  president  of  Mex 
ico,  15;  dictator  and  president,  424 

Dickman,  General,  548 

Dillon,  E.  J.,  558 

Dingley  Tariff,  the,  228,  272 

Diplomatic  isolation  of  the  United  States, 
428 

Direct  elections,  393 

Direct  primaries,  the,  231, 376, 393 

Director-General  of  Railroads,  518 

Director  of  the  Supreme  Council  of  Supply 
and  Relief,  559 

Discontent,  voiced  by  Populist  platform,  174 

Disfranchisement  of  negroes,  71,  180,  362. 
See  also  Negroes 

Division  of  Purchase,  Storage  and  Traffic, 
541 

Dix,  Governor,  382 

"Dollar  a  Year"  men,  478 

Dolliver,  Senator,  371 

Dominion  Act,  15 

Donnelly,  Ignatius,  172,  192,  268 

Dorsey,  Stephen  W.,  51, 63 

Dorsey  and  Brady,  acquittal  of,  64 

Downes  vs.  Bidwell,  288 

Draft  boards,  495 

Draft  of  1917,  487,  495;  of  1918,  541 

Drago  doctrine,  349 

Dramatic  standards,  316 

Dreadnaught  battleships,  291,  344, 450 

Drought,  in  Kansas,  168 

Dudley,  W.  W.,  142 

Dumba,  Dr.  Constantin,  448 

Dupuy  de  Lome,  237 

Eaton,  Dorman  B.,  84 
Edison,  Thomas  A.,  69 
Edmunds,  George  F.,  92 


INDEX 


593 


Edmunds  Act,  82,  163 

Education,  in  America,  early  narrowness  of, 
7;  its  part  in  reconstruction,  10;  recognized 
as  the  underlying  problem  ol  self-govern 
ment,  6,  U  S  Bureau  of,  n 

Educational  renascence  after  1876,  6 

Educational  test  for  suffrage  in  the  South,  71 

Edwards,  Edward  I.,  585 

Egan,  Patrick,  89,  138,  176 

Eight-hour  day,  an  objective  ot  the  National 
Labor  Union,  19,  457 

El  Caney,  252 

Election  frauds,  43 

Electoral  Commission,  4 

Electoral  returns,  duplicate,  from  Southern 
States,  4 

Electric  lighting,  beginnings  of,  69 

Elevated  railroads,  70 

Eliot,  Charles  W.,  n 

Elkins,  Stephen  B.,  209 

Emergency  Fleet  Corporation,  481,  513,  535, 
538,  540 

Emergency  Peace  Federation,  471 

Employer's  liability  for  injuries,  416 

England,  disputes  with,  385;  negotiations 
with,  upon  Panama  Canal,  349.  See  also 
Great  Britain 

English  understanding  of  America,  316 

Erie  Railroad,  67 

Esch-Cummins  Act,  581 

Esch-Townsend  Act,  328 

Espionage  Act  of  1917,  497,  502,  576 

"Ethiopiomania,"  31 

Evans,  Robley  D.,  343 

Evarts,  William  M.,  Secretary  of  State,  2 

Evening  Mail,  New  York,  447 

Expedition  Act,  300,  325 

Exports,  control  of,  502 

Exposure,  literature  of,  313 

Failures,  Commercial,  190 
Fairbanks,  Charles  W.,  355,  453 
Falling  prices,  225 

Farm  life,  influence  upon  American  char 
acter,  116 

Farmers'  Alliance,  166, 171,  175 
Fatherland,  The,  436,  442,  447,  452,  473 
Federal  Board  of  Vocational  Education,  417, 

499 

Federal  civil  service,  323 
Federal  Corrupt  Practices  Act,  571 
Federal  Reserve  Act,  411,  414,  564 
Federal  Reserve  Board,  411,  587 
Federal  Reserve  System,  411 
Federal  Trade  Commission,  414,  437,  538 
Federal  troops  in  the  South,  4,  5 
Federalist,  The,  386 
Fenian  raids  into  Canada,  15 
Fifteenth  Amendment,  4,  71 
Filibuster,  Senate  anti-war,  472 
Filipino  Assembly,  346,  358,  420.   See  also 

Philippines 

Finance  and  trusts,  414 
Financial  Credit,  Hayes  pledged  to  restore, 

36 

Financial  measures,  39 
Financial  reconstruction,  78 
Financial  situation  in  1913,  409 
First  American  Field  Army,  550;  First  Corps 

of,  55O,  First  Division  of,  494,  548 


|  Fletcher,  Frank  F.,  427 
|  Flour  industry,  107 
Foch,  Gen.  Ferdinand,  531, 534, 541, 548, 551, 

553 

Folger,  Charles  A.,  76 

Folk,  Joseph  W.,  316,  398 

Fonseca,  Gulf  of,  431 

Food,  retail  prices  of,  580 
I  Food  Administration,  484,  504,  509,  538,  563 

Food-supply,  106 

"  Food  will  win  the  War,"  482 

Food  and  Fuel  Act,  504,  514,  574,  575 

Poors  Errand,  A,  31 

Foraker,  J.  B.,  139,  141,  216,  264,  270,  276, 
288,355,362 

"Force  without  limit,"  526 

Ford,  Henry,  445,  557,  571,  587 

Ford,  Patrick,  129, 138 

Ford,  Paul  Leicester,  132 

Ford,  Worthington  C.,  228 

Foreign  Concessions  in  China,  283 

Forest  reserves,  339 

Forestry  and  Reclamation  Services,  342. 
See  also  Conservation 

Fort  Leavenworth,  291,  345 

Forty-second  ("Rainbow")  Division  of 
American  Expeditionary  Force,  494,  543, 
548 

Foster,  John  W.,  16 

"Fourteen  Points,"  522,  552,  557,  568,  570 

Fourteenth  Amendment,  71 

Fourth  Division  of  A.  E.  F.,  54 

Frankfurter,  Felix,  536 

Frauds,  in  mail  "Star-routes,"  62;  in  land 
claims,  101 

Free  Silver,  movement  advanced  by  mining 
booms,  37;  arguments  for  "bimetallism," 
170;  class  interests,  and  party  views,  195; 
issue  weakened  by  rise  of  "anti -imperial 
ism,"  269,  271,  404;  induces  serious  con 
sideration  of  monetary  matters,  409.  See 
also  Silver. 

Freedman's  Bureau  schools,  10 

Freeman,  419 

Freeman,  Edward  A.,  32 

French  Canal  Company,  349 

Frenzied  Finance,  315 

Frick,  Henry  Clay,  199 

Friedensturm,  533 

Friends  of  Peace,  447 

Frontier,  disappearance  of,  57,  60;  closed, 
106;  116;  its  advance  checked,  156;  158, 
336 

Fryatt,  Captain,  472 

Fuel  Administration,  505 

Fuelless  days,  518 

Fuller,  Melville  W.,  388 

Funston,  Frederick,  289,  427,  489 

Furuseth,  Andrew,  418 

Gage,  Lyman  P.,  227 

Gardner,  Augustus  P.,  443 

Garfield,  Harry  A.,  504 

Garfield,  James  A.,  nominated,  50;   elected 

President,  51;  relations  with  the  Senate, 

52;  assassinated,  53 
Garfield,  James  R.,  301 
Garrison,  Lindley  M.,  449 
Gary,  Indiana,  574 
General  Education  Board,  321 


594 


INDEX 


General  Electric  Company,  338 

General  Land  Office,  6 1,  99,  341 

General  Munitions  Board,  484,  513,  514 

General  Staff,  for  the  Army,  291,  344,  449, 
541,  562,  584 

Geological  Survey,  115 

George,  Henry,  129,  180,  305 

Gerard,  James  W.,  423 

German  armistice,  553 

German  drives  of  1918,  544 

German  Empire  mobilized,  433 

German  Government,  U.  S.  grievance 
against,  476 

German  interests  in  Morocco,  348;  in  Nicara 
gua,  430 

German  intrigue  in  America,  447,  453 

German  Navy  League,  241 

German  Peace  overtures  of  1916,  468 

German  propaganda  in  America,  436 

German  rivalry,  383 

German  Socialists,  influence  of,  19,  524,  525 

German  tariff  of  1879,  81 

German-American  Alliance,  287 

Germany,  state  of  war  with,  476,  566;  sug 
gestion  as  to  Philippines,  260;  threatened 
breach  with,  287 

Gilder,  Richard  Watson,  27 

Gillett,  Frederick  H.,  571 

Gilman,  Daniel  Coit,  n 

Gladden,  Washington,  316 

Glass,  Carter,  411,  564 

Glavis,  Louis  R.,  370 

Godkin,  Edwin  Lawrence,  26,  84,  136,  210, 
268,  419 

Goethals,  George  B.,  352,  383,  429,  431,  481, 
540,  54i 

"Gold  Democrats,"  222 

Gold  standard,  189,  214,  222,  265,  271,  276. 

See  also  Bimetallism,  and  Silver 
Golf,  123 

Gomez,  General,  234 

Gompers,  Samuel,  129,  281,  360,  415,  458, 
479.  575-  See  also  American  Federation 
of  Labor 

"G".  O.  P.,"  the,  224,  400 
Gorgas,  William  C.,  289,  352,  383 
Gorman,  Arthur  P.,  180,  208 
Gould,  Jay,  68,  73,  130,  294 
Government  by  injunction,  201 
Government  control,  extension  of,  325 
Government  housing,  535 
Gowen,  Franklin  M.,  21 
Grain  Corporation,  504 
Grand  Army  of  the  Republic,  92, 97,  563 
Grandissimes,  The,  31 
Granger  movement,  the,  112,  166,  299,  328, 

373,  465 
Grant,  Gen.  U.  S.,  renewed  regard  for,  48; 

death  of,  104 

Grant  and  Ward,  failure  of,  103,  188 
Graves,  Henry  S.,  378 
Great  American  Desert,  157 
Great  Britain,  settlements  with,  14 
Great  Northern  Railroad,  295,  326 
"Greatest  Show  on  Earth,"  118 
Greeley,  Horace,  20,  44 
Greenback  and  Labor  Parties,  fusion  of,  86 
Greenbacks,  issuance  necessary  during  Civil 

War,  36;  at  close  of  Civil  War,  40 
Greenbackers  of  1876,  19 


Gresham,  Walter  Q.,  139,  174,  182 
Gresham  law,  35,  170,  190,  194 
Grey,  Viscount,  387 
Guantanamo  Bay,  248 

Hadley,  Arthur  T.,  267 

Hague  tribunals,  287,  347,  348,  385,  387 

Haig,  Sir  Douglas,  549 

Haiti,  430,  431 

"Half-Breed,"  group  in  Republican  Party, 

46 

!  Half  Moon,  390 

Half-tone  process  of  making  illustrations,  69 
Halifax  award  t)f  1877,  385 
Hall  of  Representatives,  reconstruction  of, 

405 

Hamilton,  Alexander,  35,  386,  412 
Hampton,  Gen.  Wade,  4 
Hancock,  Gen.  W.  S.,  50,  80 
Hanna,  Marcus  A.,  215,  222,  226,  233,  264, 

269,272,278,307,328,354,366 
Hard  times,  following  panic  of  1873,  79 
Harding,  Warren  G.,  569,  583,  588 
Harmon,  Governor,  382,  398 
Harmsworth,  Alfred  Charles,  233 
Harper,  Jesse,  167 
Harper's  Monthly,  27,  314 
Harper's  Weekly,  49,  84,  92,  145,  399 
Harper's  Young  People,  31 
Harriman,  Edward  H.,  293,  329 
Harris,  Joel  Chandler,  31 
Harrison,  Benjamin,  139,  142,  145;  adminis 
tration  of,  175 

Harrison,  Francis  Burton,  420 
Hartranft,  Governor,  21,  23 
Harvey,  George,  399 
Haverly's  Mastodon  Minstrels,  31 
Hawaii  becomes  a  Territory  of  the  United 

States,  242,  344 

Hay,  John,  Ambassador  to  London,  226; 
member  of  peace  commission  to  Paris, 
1898,  258;  extends  American  ideals  across 
Pacific,  272;  Secretary  of  State  under 
McKinley,  283;  efforts  to  safeguard  China 
during  Russo-Japanese  War,  346;  note 
about  Second  Hague  Conference,  348; 
negotiations  with  French  Canal  Company, 
349 

Hay-Herran  Treaty,  350 
Hay-Pauncefote  Treaty,  285, 384,  429,  569 
Hayes,  John  L.,  80 

Hayes,  Rutherford  B.,  inauguration  of,   i, 
Cabinet    and   Congress,   2 ;     promises,  3 ; 
home  rule  in  the  South,  3;  social  unrest, 
18;  railroad  strikes,  21;   specie  payments, 
35;  Democratic  charges  against,  43;  break 
with  the  Stalwarts,  48 
Haymarket  riots  in  Chicago,  129 
Hays,  Will  H.,  556 
Haywood,  William  D.,  461 
Hearst,  William  Randolph,  223,  309,  357, 

360,  362 

Henderson,  David  B.,  146,  306 
Henry  Street  Settlement,  416 
Hepburn  Railroad  Law,  329 
Hepburn  Report,  113 
Herald,  New  York,  47,  77,  80 
Herbert,  Hilary  A.,  182 
Hewitt,  Abram  S.,  129 
High  prices,  573,580 


INDEX 


595 


"Hill  165,"  548 

Hill,  David  B.,  138, 142, 157, 180,  268,  309 

Hill,  James  J.,  295, 326 

History,  new  school  of  writers  of,  33 

History  of  the  People  of  the  United  States,  33 

History  of  the  Standard  Oil  Company,  315 

History  of  the  United  States  since  the  Com 
promise  of  1850,  34 

Hoar,  Senator  George  Frisbie,  262 

Hobart,  Garrett  A.,  217,  238,  269 

Hobson,  Richmond  P.,  249,  408 

Hog  Island,  482,  535 

Holland,  J.  G.,  27 

Holt,  Hamilton,  446 

Home  rule,  promise  of  restoration  to  the 
South,  3 

Homestead  Law,  the,  99,  100,  no,  336,  341; 
system,  8 

Homestead  Works,  strike  at,  197,  199,  280 

Honduras,  384,  431 

Honorable  Peter  Stirling,  The,  132 

Hoover,  Herbert  C.,  435,  478,  483,  504,  556, 
559, 576,  582 

House,  Edward  M.,  528,  541,  558 

House  on  Henry  Street,  The,  133 

Houston,  David  F.,  404,  580 

How  the  Other  Half  Lives,  133 

Howard,  Gen.  O.  O.,  17 

Howells,  William  Dean,  30 

Hubbard,  Governor,  quoted,  16 

Hubbell  letter,  the,  63:  77 

Hudson-Fulton  celebration,  390 

Huerta,  Victoriano,  424,  427 

Hughes,  Charles  E.,  316,  356,  388,  452,  476, 
556,  5?6 

Hull  House,  133,  416 

Hunting  Trips  of  a  Ranchman,  275 

Huntington,  Collis  P.,  294 

Huxley,  Thomas,  6,  32 

Hyphenated  Americans,  453 

Idaho  Avalanche,  The,  99 

Illegal  enclosures  of  public  lands,  101 

Immigrants,  influence  in  the  war  of  classes, 
24;  the  unassimilated,  459 

Immigration,  and  education,  6;  from  Europe, 
56,  88;  increase  after  1878,  128;  law  of 
1907,418;  problems  of,  325,  415.  See  also 
A  mericanization 

Imperialism,  241,  271.  See  also  Anti- 
imperialists 

Imports,  power  to  control,  503 

Incandescent  light,  invented,  69 

Income  Tax  Amendment,  368 

Independent,  New  York,  5,  319 

Indian  Bureau,  84 

Indian  Territory,  161 

Indian  Wars,  17 

Industrial  Board  created,  564 

Industrial  confidence,  271 

Industrial  reorganization,  70 

Industrial  unrest,  204 

Industrial  Workers  of  the  World,  460 

Influence  of  Sea-Poiver  upon  History,  212 

Ingalls,  John  J.,  172 

Ingersoll,  Robert,  56 

Initiative  and  referendum,  the,  231,  375;  and 
recall,  393 

Injunction,  government  by,  201 

Inland  Waterways  Commission,  339 


Innocents  Abroad,  The,  29 
Insurrection  in  Cuba,  1895,  234 
Inter-Allied  Conference,  529 
Inter-Allied  General  Staff,  531 
Inter-Allied  Munitions  Council,  541 
Inter-Ally   Council  on  War  Purchases  and 

Finance,  527 

Inter-Ocean,  Chicago,  the,  35, 63,  89 
"Interests,"  in  politics,  230 
Interior,  Department  of  the,  371 
Internal  revenues,  78 
International  conference  on  silver,  44 
International  law,  471;  American  view  of, 

447 
International  peace,  American  Share  in,  348, 

387.     Se'e  also  The  Hague,  and  Arbitration 
Interstate  Commerce,  early  investigation  of, 

112 

Interstate  Commerce  Act,  114,  327,  380     «^_ 
Interstate  Commerce  Commission,  114,  327, 

379,  404,  413 
Intimidation  of  negro  voters,  4.    See  also 

Negroes 

"Iowa  idea,"  the,  305,  366 
Irish  Land  League,  89 
Irish  vote,  88 
7mA  World,  129 
Irons,  Martin,  130 
Irrigation,  337,  379 
Italy,  controversy  with,  176;  enters  World 

War,  474 

Jackson,  Andrew,  35,  82,  412 

James,  Henry,  30 

Japan,  a  possible  rival  in  the  Pacific,  344; 
war  with  Russia,  346;  relations  with  China, 
356;  immigration  to  U.  S.,  356;  Taft's  visit 
to,  358;  grievances  against  U.  S.,  428; 
joins  the  Allies  against  Germany,  474 

Jenckes,  Thomas  A.,  84 

Jim  Smiley  and  his  Jumping  Frog,  29 

Joan  of  Arc,  The  Personal  Recollections  of,  30 

Joffre,  Marshal,  490 
,     Johns  Hopkins  University,  n,  321 

Johnson,  Andrew,  83 
v.  Jcjhnson,  Senator  Hiram  W.,  400,  454,  476, 

n 570, 572, 582, 587 

Johnson,  Robert  Underwood,  27 
Johnson,  Tom,  180,  305 
Johnston,  Gen.  Joseph  E.,  2 
Jones,  B.  F.,  93 
Jones,  "Golden  Rule,"  305 
Jones  Merchant  Marine  Act,  584 
Journal,  New  York,  233 
Journalism,  new  types  of,  313,  419 
Jungle,  The,  315 


Kansas  City^  Star,  419 

Kansas  Pacific  Railroad,  73,  156 

Keating-Owen  Child  Labor  Bill,  416 

Kelley,  "Pig  Iron,"  137 

Kemble,  W'illiam  H.,  49 

Keokuk,  dam  at,  338 

Kerensky,  Alexander,  523 

Kern,  John  W.,  360 

Kerosene,  66 

Key,  David  M.,  Postmaster-General,  2 

Keyes,  Col.  E.  W.,  47 

Kiau-chau,  241,  283 

Kiel  Canal,  Opening  of,  431 


596 


INDEX 


King,  Clarence,  115 
Klondike  gold  fields,  225 
Knickerbocker  Trust  Company,  334 
Knights  of  Labor,  the,  24,  127,  130,  168, 

192 
Knox,  Senator  Philander  C.,  300,  383,  384, 

426,  476,  570 

Labor  and  politics,  361 ;  and  the  world  war, 

479, 534 

Labor  conferences,  575 
Labor,  Department  of,  404,  535 
Labor  movement,  a  stratification  01  society, 

19 

Labor  problem,  new  importance  of,  126 
Labor  problems,  280 
Labor,  unsettled  condition  of,  573 
Labor's  National  Peace  Council,  447 
Lady  of  the  Aroostook,  The,  30 
La  Follette,  Robert  M.,  231,  308,  328,  373, 

375,  394,  396,  40?,  413,  4i8,  463,  570,  587 
La  Follette 's  Magazine,  419 
Lamar,  Justice,  388 
Lament,  Daniel,  182 
Land  distribution,  99 
Land  grants  to  colleges,  8,  417;  to  railroads, 

57,  102 

Lane,  Franklin  K.,  404 
Lansing,  Robert,  448,  558,  567,  572 
Las  Guasimas,  battle  of,  249 
Lathrop,  Julia  C.,  415 
Latin  America,  relations  with,  384 
Law  of  Contraband,  440 
Lawrence  strike,  459 
Lawson,  Thomas,  315 
Leader,  Milwaukee,  510 
Leadville,  Colo.,  39 
League  of  Nations,  557,  560;  covenant  of, 

561;  debate  upon,  565,  573 
League  to  Enforce  Peace,  446,  557 
Lee,  Fitzhugh,  236 
Legge,  Alexander,  538 
Legislative  assembly  in  the  Philippines,  first, 

290.     See  also  Filipinos,  and  Philippines 
Lenine,  Nicolai,  475,  525 
Leo  XIII,  24 
Leslie's,  48,  129,  211,  268 
Leupp,  Francis  E.,  308 
Lever  Act,  504 
Lexow  Commission,  202 
Liberator,  419 
Liberty  engine,  485 
Liberty  Loans,  first,  486;  drives,  508 
Life,  421 

Life  on  the  Mississippi,  26,  339 
Liggett,  Gen.  Hunter,  550 
Lincoln,  Territory  of,  bill  to  establish,  38 
Lind,  John,  425 
Literature,  transition  in,  30 
Literary  standards,  316 
Literary  theories  about  1866,  the  accepted,  29 
Literature,  the  "immortals"  of,  29 
Little  Big  Horn  River,  17 
Little  Lord  Fauntleroy,  31 
Little  Rock  and  Fort  Smith  Railroad,  90 
Lloyd  George,  David,  481 
Lloyd,  Henry  D.,  66,  201,  298 
Loan  Act,  485 
Loans  to  Allies,  486,  579 
Local  color  in  American  literature,  30 


Lodge,  Henry  Cabot,  91,  181,  262,  387,  557; 

manifesto  of,  569,  571,  582 
Logan,  Gen4  John  A.,  92 
"Long  drive,"  the,  108,  in 
Long,  John  D.,  238,  269 
"Long-and-short-haul  clause,"  the,  114 
Looking  Backward,  131,  267 
Lorillard,  Pierre,  74 
Lorimer,  William,  376 
Louvain,  437 
Lovett,  Robert  S.,  513 
Low,  Seth,  305 
Lowden,  Frank  0.,  583 
Lowell,  A.  Lawrence,  446 
Lowell  Institute,  32 
Lowell,  James  Russell,  26, 149 
Luce,  Stephen  B.,  212 
Lurton,  Justice,  388 
Lusitania,  the,  441,  528 

MacDonald,  Sir  John  A.,  15 

MacVeagh,  Wayne,  51, 182 

McAdoo,  William  G.,  403,  412,  507,  518,  564, 
581,585 

McClellan,  George  B.,  7,  18 

McClure's  Magazine,  314 

McCormick,  Vance,  503 

McCrary,  George  W.,  Secretary  of  War,  2 

McKinley,  William,  early  study  of  the  tariff, 
79;  minority  leader  in  House  of  Represen 
tatives,  137;  a  candidate  for  Presidential 
nomination,  139,  178;  tariff  bill,  146,  214; 
elected  President,  222;  relations  with  Con 
gress,  264;  public  opinion  upon  the  issues, 
271;  assassinated,  272 

McKinley  Bill  of  1890,  214,  366 

McMaster,  John  Bach,  33 

McNamara  brothers,  462 

McParlan,  James,  21 

McReynolds,  James  C.,  413 

Madero,  Francisco  I.,  424 

Mahan,  A.  T.,  212,  238,  245 

Mail  service  to  the  frontier,  61 

Maine,  destruction  of  battleship,  237 

Mainz,  554 

Mandatories,  570 

Mangin,  Gen.,  549 

Manila  Bay,  battle  of,  240 

Manila,  city  taken  by  assault,  242 

Mann,  Horace,  7 

Mann,  James  R.,  406,  571 

Mann-Elkins  Act,  380 

Manning,  Daniel,  96 

Manning,  Van  H.,  378 

March,  Gen.  Peyton  C.,  541,  556 

Marcy,  William  H.,  82 

Marines  in  the  War,  548 

Marne,  second  battle  of  the,  548 

Marroquin,  President,  350 

Marshall,  Thomas  R.,  398,  400 

Martine,  James,  399 

Marx,  Karl,  128,  459 

Massachusetts  Institute  of  Technology,  6,  8 

Masses,  The,  419,  510 

Mechanical  progress,  390 

Mergers,  railroad,  294 

Merit  system,  84 

Merritt,  Gen.  Wesley,  242 

Metropolitan  Magazine,  419 

Meuse-Argonne,  battle  of,  552 


INDEX 


597 


Mexico,  friction  with,  16,  348;  intervention  | 

in,  427 

Mexican  occupation,  469 
Mexican  policy  of  President  Hayes,  17 
Mexican  revolution  of  1876,  15 
Mexican  revolution  of  1912,  424 
Michigan  Agricultural  College,  8 
"Middle-of-the-road"  Populists,  268,  309. 
Miles,  Gen.  Nelson  A.,  18, 171,  203,  243,  256, 

291 
Military  missions  from  France  and  Great 

Britain,  490 

Militia,  and  regular  army,  202 
Mills  Bill,  408 

Mills,  Roger  Q.,  137,  139, 146 
Miners'  movement  for  free  silver,  43 
Mines,  North  Sea  barrage,  490 
Mining,  37,  379 
Mississippi  River,  70,  339 
Missouri  Pacific  Railroad,  130 
Mr.  Isaacs,  30 
Mitchell,  John,  281,  303 
"Mobile  Doctrine,"  426 
Modern  Instance,  A,  30 
"Molly  Maguires,"  the,  20,  281 
Monetary  conference,  189 
Monetary  investigations,  408 
Money  kings,  71 
Money  trust,  410 
Monopolies,  67 

Monroe  Doctrine,  210,  286,  426,  568,  570 
Moody  and  Sankey,  133 
Mooney,  Thomas,  463,  475 
Morgan,  J.  Pierpont,  207,  295 
Morgan,  Senator  John  Tyler,  350 
Mormons,  in  Utah,  163 
Morocco,  crisis  in,  347 
Morrill  Act,  8,417 
Morrill  Tariff  of  1861,77 
Morse,  Samuel  F.  B.,  68 
Morton,  J.  S.,  193 
Morton,  Levi  P.,  139 
Moses,  George  H.,  570 
Motor  cars,  392 
Mott,  Lucretia,  579 
"Movies,"  the,  317 
Moyer,  461 
"Muckraking,"  313 
Mugwumps,  the,  91,  139,  402 
Mulligan  Letters,  the,  90,  139 
Munitions  embargoes,  446 
Munn  vs.  Illinois,  case  of,  113 
Munsey,  Frank  A.,  397 
Munsey's  Magazine,  314 
Murchison  letter,  the,  142,  215 
Music,  318 

Nasby,  Petroleum  V.,  32 

Nashville  Normal  College,  10 

Nation,  The,  New  York,  27,  84,  92,  103, 173, 

184, 193,  197,  206,  210,  223,  301,  376,  394, 

419,  570 

Nation,  London,  468,  474,  532 
National  Academy  of  Sciences,  451 
National  Army,  494 
National  banking  system,  412 
National  Conservation  Commission,  340 
National  Defense  Act  of  1916,  449,  487,  584 
National  defense,  appropriation  for,  244 
National  Farmers'  Alliance,  166 


National  German-American  Alliance,  436 

National  Guard,  460 

National  Labor  Congress  of  1868,  20 

National  Labor  Party,  20 

National  Labor  Union,  19,  127 

National  Museum,  381 

National  Non-Partisan  League,  465 

National  politics,  loss  of  hold  upon  people,  56 

National    Progressive   Republican   League, 

393 

National  Prohibition  Party,  20 
National  Research  Council,  451 
National  Security  League,  443,  519 
National  Silver  Party,  221 
National  unity  in  1876,  the  problem  of,  6 
National  War  Labor  Board,  536,  556 
Nationalist  Republican  Party,  172 
Naturalization     problems,    415.    See    also 

Americanization  and  Immigration 
Naval  Appropriation  Act  of  1916,  450 
Naval  architecture,  198 
Naval  Consulting  Board,  451 
Naval  participation  in  World  War,  490 
Naval  Program,  of  1916,  450 
Naval  War  College,  212 
Naval  War  of  1812,  275 
Navigation,  inland,  339 
Navy,  the  new,  211 
Navy  League,  443 

Negroes,  education  of,  10,  71,  180,  362 
Neo-Republicanism,  136 
Neutral  trade,  501 

Neutrality  at  opening  of  World  War,  435 
New  Mexico,  admission  of,  378 
"New  Nationalism,"  381,  395 
New  Republic,  419,  570,  582 
New  York  Central  Railroad,  23,  67,  72 
New  York  College  Settlement,  133 
New  York  mayoralty  campaign  of  1886,  129 
New  York  Yacht  Club,  120 
Newberry,  Senator  Truman  H.,  571 
Newlands,  Francis  G.,  337 
Nez  Perces  Indians,  17 
Nicaragua,  384, 430;  right  of  way,  431 
Nicholas  II  of  Russia,  474 
Nicholls,  Francis  T.,  4 
Nicolay  and  Hay's  Life  of  Lincoln,  227,  259, 

3U 

Ninety-third  Division,  A.  E.  F.,  548 
Non-Partisan  Leader,  465 
Non-Partisan  League,  465 
Norris,  Frank,  315 
Norris,  George  W.,  377 
North  American  Review,  128,  138,  151 
North  Pole,  discovery  of,  391 
North  Sea,  490 
Northern  Pacific  Railroad,  57,  59,  107,  no, 

157,  295,  326,  334 

Northern  Securities  Company,  299,  326 
Northwest  Ordinance,  pledges  public  aid  to 

common  schools,  6 
Nye,  Bill,  32 

Observer,  404 

Octopus,  The,  315 

Office-holders  in  politics,  47 

Officers'  Training  Camps,  487,  495 

Official  Bulletin,  480,  563 

O'Gorman,  James  A.,  429 

Ohio  Constitutional  Convention,  395 


598 


INDEX 


"Ohio  idea,"  the,  41 

Ohio  Life  and  Trust  Company,  188 

Ohio  statesmen,  the,  216 

Oil  business,  combination  in,  67 

Oil,  discovery  of,  424 

Oklahoma,  161;  opening  of,  162,  332,  378 

"Old  Guard,"  583 

O'Leary,  Jeremiah  A.,  454 

Olney,  Richard,  182 

"Omnibus  States,"  admission  of  the,  155 

"Open  door,"  in  China,  283 

Opera,  318 

Ord,  Gen.,  17 

Order  of  the  Carabao,  420 

Order  of  the  Dragon,  420 

Oregon  and  Trans-Continental  Co.,  59 

Oregon  Railway  and  Navigation  Co.,  59 

Organization  of  railroad  employees,  21 

O'Shaughnessy,  Nelson,  426 

Outlook,  193, 300, 306, 307,  367,  368,  419,  518 

Overman  Bill,  520,  537 

Overproduction,  agricultural,  165 

Overproduction,  in  1888,  136 

Pacifist  movements,  445,  471 

Packard,  Stephen  B.,  4 

Packing  houses,  rise  of,  109 

Page,  Thomas  Nelson,  423 

Page,  Walter  Mines,  423 

Palace  of  Peace,  387 

Palmer,  A.  Mitchell,  439,  504,  574,  585 

Palmer,  John  M.,  222 

Pan-American  Congress,  considered,  54,  149 

Pan-German  Plot  Exposed,  467 

Pan-Germanism,  433 

Panama,  secession  from  Colombia,  351 

Panama  Canal,  Goethals's  work  upon,  383; 
necessity  for,  54,  242,  272,  285,  349,  352, 
358;  opening  of,  431 ;  repeal  of  tolls  exemp 
tion,  429;  tolls  controversy,  585;  treaty 
with  Colombia,  426 

Panic  of  1857,  188;  of  1873,  18,  41,  188;  of 
1884,  103;  of  1893,  184,  186,  293-;  of  1907, 

334,  343,  409 

Paris,  Treaty  of,  283,  288, 345 
Parker,  Alton  B.,  309,  359 
Parker,  Edwin  B.,  538 
Parkman,  Francis,  33 
Party  heresies,  306 
Passes,  abolition  of  free  railroad,  330 
Patronage  and  the  Senate,  52 
Patrons  of  Husbandry,  112 
Pauncefote,  Lord,  569 
Payne,  Henry  C.,  309 
Payne,  Sereno  E.,  367 

Payne-Aldrich  Tariff,  367,  374,  382,  390,  407 
Peabody,  George,  10 
Peace  Commission,  258 
Peace  Conference,  567;  compromises  of  the, 

568 

Peace,  European  opinion  of  the,  559 
"Peace  of  Justice,"  560 
Peace  overtures  of  1917,  522 
Peace  treaties,   420.     See   also    Arbitration 

treaties 

Peace  Treaty  of  1919,  delay  in  ratifying,  575 
"Peace  without  victory,"  560 
Peary,  Robert  E.,  391 
Pembina,  Territory  of,  discussed,  38 
Pendleton,  George  W-,  84 


Pennsylvania  constabulary,  460 
Pennsylvania  Railroad  strike  of  1877,  18; 

an  oil  road,  67,  72,  73,  152 
Pennsylvania  State  College,  8 
Penrose,  Senator  Boies,  264,  328,  369,  439, 

583 

Pension  laws,  150 

People's  Council  for  Democracy  and  Terms 
of  Peace,  510 

People's  Party,  the,  organized,  1891,  172; 
platform,  174;  for  free  coinage  of  silver  and 
gold,  189;  success  in  elections  of  1892,  205; 
gathering  power  in  1896,  214;  waning 
hopes,  221^  leads  Republican  party  to 
counter-reformation,  229.  See  also  Popu 
list  Party 

Perkins,  George  W.,  310 

Pershing,  Gen.  John  J.,  489,  545,  556 

Personal  Memoirs,  Gen.  Grant's,  105 

Petain,  Gen.,  548 

Petroleum  industry,  beginnings  of,  66 

Philadelphia  and  Reading  '  Railroad,  strike 
of  1877,  21 

Philippine  Islands,  259,  289,  344,  345,  358, 
368,  420 

Phillips,  Wendell,  2,  42 

Phonograph,  invented,  69 

Photographic  dry  plate,  invented,  69 

Pinafore,  422 

Pinchot,  Gifford,  339,  370,  376,  395,  439 

Pipe-lines,  for  oil,  67 

Pitney,  Justice,  388 

Pittman  Silver  Act,  539 

Pittsburgh,  rioting  in,  23 

Platt  Amendment,  384 

Platt,  Thomas  C.,  2,  47,  53,  145,  264,  268, 
270,  328 

Plattsburg,  450 

Plumb  plan,  580 

Poindexter,  Senator  Miles,  407,  557,  570,  572 

Police  Strike  in  Boston,  575 

Pomcroy's  Democrat,  42 

Population,  increase  of  city,  132 

Populism,  165,  221,  268,  305,  309,  368,  465 

Populist  Party,  the,  organized,  1891,  172; 
platform,  174;  Populist  vote  throws  vic 
tory  to  Democrats,  1892,  181;  practical 
disappearance  of,  360;  first  to  discuss 
initiative  and  referendum,  375;  advocate 
of  Postal  Savings  Act,  380;  original  planks 
largely  adopted  by  the  older  parties,  401. 
See  also  People's  Parly 

"Porkopolis,"  106 

Port  Arthur,  283 

Porto  Rico,  256,  259.  288 


__ 

1'ost.  Washington,  >j- 
Post-Office  Department,  61 
Postal  Savings  Act,  380 
Potter,  Clarkson  N.,  43 
Potter,  Henry  C.,  131 
Potter  Law,  of  Wisconsin,  113 
Powderly,  Terence  V.,  129,  169,  192 
Powell,  J.  W.,  115 
Pre-dreadnaught  battleships,  291 
Preemption  Laws,  100,  no,  115 
Preparedness  movement,  442 
President,  the  office  of,  278 
Presidential  leadership,  406 
Presidential  patronage,  83 


INDEX 


599 


Price-Fixing  Committee,  538 

Prices  of  Commodities,  cause  of  decrease  in, 

37 

Primary,  the  direct,  231,  396 

Prince,  L.  B.,  48 

Prince  and  the  Pauper,  The,  30 

Princeton  University,  321 

Priorities,  control  of,  512,  537 

Private  fortunes,  accumulation  of,  71 

Problem  of  the  Philippines,  259 

Professional  education,  10 

Progress  and  Poverty,  129,  305 

Progressive  Party,  the,  395,  398,  453;  and 
Roosevelt,  400,  451 

Prohibition,  94,  421,  578 

Propaganda,  during  World  War,  436 

Property  and  politics,  224 

Prosperity,  after  resumption  of  specie  pay 
ments,  in  1879,  76;  era  of,  56,  334;  in  the 
eighties,  79;  revival  of,  266 

Protection  and  the  gold  standard,  214;  in 
Canada,"8i;  the  "Chinese  wall"  of,  149; 
varying  views  upon,  81.  See  also  Bimetal 
lism  and  Tariff 

Protective  tariff,  86,  276 

Protocol  of  1898,  258 

Provincialism,  32 

Provpst-Marshal-General,  488,  536 

Public  Land  frauds,  99 

Public  Ledger,  Philadelphia,  478,  582 

Public  opinion,  312 

Puck,  275 

Pujo,  A.  P.,  410 

Pullman  strike,  the,  200,  280,  361 

Pure  Food  Act,  331 

Quay,  Matthew  S.,  23, 140, 264, 270, 304, 328 
Quick,  Herbert,  395 

Radcliffe  College,  10 

Radical  Republicans,  embittered  by  Presi 
dent  Hayes's  Cabinet  appointments,  2 

Radicalism,  revolutionary,  575,  576 

Railroad  Act  of  1910,  380 

Railroad  administration,  during  the  war,  518 

Railroad  Brotherhoods,  strike  of,  454 

Railroad  construction,  15 

Railroad  Control  Act,  580 

Railroad  Labor  Board,  581 

Railroad  regulation,  112,377 

Railroad  reorganization,  293 

Railroad  riots  of  1877,  a  sign  of  a  new  indus 
trial  epoch,  23 

Railroad  strikes  of  1877,  21,  24, 129,  460 

Railroads,  expansion  of,  57 

Railroads  War  Board,  517 

Ramona,  31 

Ranches,  cattle,  no 

Randall,  Samuel  J.,  43 

Rankin,  Jeannette,  476 

Rapid  transit,  70 

Ratification  of  Treaty  of  peace  with  Spain, 
262 

Ratio  between  values  of  gold  and  silver,  35 

Reading  Railroad,  191 

Recall  of  judges,  379 

Reciprocity  with  Canada,  388,  389,  394 

Reciprocity  with  Cuba,  302 

Reclamation  fund,  337 

Recognition,  demanded  by  Diaz,  15 


Reconstruction,  566 

Recreation,  popular,  74 

Redemption  of  greenbacks,  demands  for,  41 

Reed,  Thomas  B.,  supports  McKinley  tariff, 
137;  Republican  leader  in  House  of  Repre 
sentatives,  146;  Speaker  of  the  House,  178, 
192;  defeated  for  Presidential  nomina 
tion,  217;  re-elected  speaker,  228;  retires 
from  Congress,  306;  leader  in  revision  of 
House  rules,  373 

Referendum,  the,  231 

Reform,  appeal  for,  77 

Reform  Program,  374 

Reid,  Whitelaw,  178 

Religious  spirit,  319 

Remsen,  Ira,  11,321 

Repeal  of  Sherman  Silver  Purchase  Act,  191 

Representation,  two  theories  of,  276 

Representatives,  House  of,  change  in  rules, 
376;  anxious  to  embarrass  President 
Hayes,  3 

Republic,  391 

Republican  factions,  46 

Republican  governments  in  the  South,  sup 
ported  by  President  Grant,  5 

Republican  Party,  reformed  to  appeal  to  the 
people,  230;  reorganized,  556 

Rerdell,  M.  C.,  64 

Resumption,  Act  of  1875,  41,  76,  207,  226 

Revenue  Act  of  1917,  505,  564 

Review,  The  Weekly,  419 

Rheims,  437,  548 

Rhodes,  James  Ford,  34 

Rights  of  Neutrals,  434,  474 

Riis,  Jacob,  133,  308 

Riley,  James  Whitcomb,  32 

Rise  of  Silas  Lapham,  30,  74 

Rising  prices,  225 

Robin  Hood,  The  Merry  Adventures  of,  31 

Rockefeller,  John  D.,  8,  66,  73,  296,  320 

Rockefeller  Foundation,  321 

Rockefeller  Institute,  321 

Roller  skate,  the,  123 

Roman  Church,  attitude  toward  Socialism,  24 

Roosevelt,  the,  Admiral  Peary's  boat,  391 

Roosevelt,  Franklin  D.,  586 

Roosevelt,  Theodore,  Sr.,  nomination  as  Col 
lector  of  New  York  not  confirmed  by  Sen 
ate,  47 

Roosevelt,  Theodore,  a  leader  against  the 
nomination  of  Elaine,  91 ;  a  cattle  ranch 
man,  no;  member  of  the  Boone  and  Crock 
ett  Club,  117;  interest  ir.  boxing,  121;  nom 
inated  for  mayor  of  New  York,  130;  urges 
reform  in  election  system,  143 ;  appointed 
to  Civil  Service  Commission  by  Pres.  Harri 
son,  177 ;  Police  Commissioner  of  New  York 
City,  202;  Assistant  Secretary  of  the  Navy, 
238;  supports  Wood  in  raising  the  "Rough 
Riders,"  243 ;  at  battle  of  San  Juan,  254;  the 
"round  robin"  at  Santiago,  256;  a  national 
figure  in  politics,  261;  Governor  of  New 
York,  270;  Vice-President,  271;  succeeds  to 
Presidency,  274;  early  political  career,  274; 
varied  activities,  275;  open  door  in  China, 
284;  Panama  Canal  Problems,  285;  inter 
vention  in  Venezuela,  286;  administration 
of  colonies,  288;  urges  reform  of  military 
education,  291;  railroad  reorganization, 
293;  by  business,  296;  presidential  cam- 


6oo 


INDEX 


paign  of  1904,  302;  attitude  toward  big 
business,  Cuba  and  the  anthracite  coal 
strike,  302;  attack  upon  Judge  Parker,  311; 
interest  in  immigration  problems,  325; 
panic  of  1907,  334;  attitude  upon  conser 
vation,  irrigation,  and  water  powers,  335; 
cruise  of  the  battle-fleet,  343;  changes  in 
War  Department,  345;  wins  Nobel  Peace 
Prize,  346;  mediator  between  Japan  and 
Russia,  347;  call  for  Second  Hague  Con 
ference,  348;  the  Panama  Revolution,  351; 
attitude  toward  third  term,  355;  hunting 
trip  to  Africa,  364;  views  upon  tariff  revi 
sion,  366;  Pinchot's  letter,  372;  insurgent 
revolt  against  Taf  1,373;  statement  of  party 
principles,  375;  return  from  Africa,  380; 
Nobel  prize  address,  381 ;  effect  of  policies 
upon  South  America,  383;  opposes  arbitra 
tion  with  Great  Britain,  387 ;  National  Pro 
gressive  Republican  League,  393;  pressure 
of  friends  to  accept  nomination,  395 ;  nomi 
nated  by  Progressive  Party  for  President, 
400;  attempted  assassination,'4Oi ;  defeated 
in  Presidential  election,  402;  upon  Ameri 
can  neutrality,  436;  continued  political 
leadership,  451 ;  the  "Roosevelt  Division," 
497 ;  opposes  program  of  League  to  Enforce 
Peace,  557;  death,  573 

Roosevelt,  Theodore,  Jr.,  576 

Roosevelt-Root  administration  of  the  army, 

584 

Root,  Elihu,  reorganization  of  War  Depart 
ment,  269,  272,  288,  291,  345;  Roosevelt's 
opinion  of,  356;  leadership  in  establishing 
Central  American  court  of  arbitration,  384; 
negotiates  arbitration  treaty  with  Great 
Britain,  386;  chairman  of  Republican  Con 
vention,  398;  mission  to  South  America, 
426;  supports  League  of  Nations,  587 

Rosen,  Baron,  348 

Rosenwald,  Julius,  484,  514 

"Rough  Riders,"  the,  243,  250,  254,  497 

"Round  robin,"  before  Santiago,  256 

Royal  Mounted  Police,  18 

"Rum,  Romanism,  and  Rebellion,"  Bur- 
chard's  use  of  the  phrase,  94 

Rusk,  Jeremiah  M.,  114 

Russia,  346,  428;  revolution  of  1917,  474; 
of  1918,  512,  561,  566,  573 

Revolutionary  Government,  522 

Russo-Japanese  War,  346 

Ryan,  John  D.,  520,  540 

Saar  Valley,  568 

Sabotage,  459 

Sackville-\Vest,  Sir  Lionel,  142,  215 

"Safety  First"  Campaign,  417 

Sagasta,  Ministry  of,  236 

St.  John,  Governor,  94 

St.  Lawrence  fisheries,  arbitration  upon,  14 

Saint-Mihiel,  550 

St.  Nicholas,  31 

Salvador,  431 

Salvation  Army,  133 

Sampson,  W.  T.,  238,  245,  255 

Sanitation  of  Canal  Zone,  352 

Santiago,  blockade  of,  247;  naval  battle,  254 

Santo  Domingo,  384,  431 

Sarajevo,  432 

Saturday  Evening  Post,  582 


Saturday  Review,  London,  524 

Scandals,  caused  by  corruption  in  national 
and  local  politics,  46 

Schedule  K,  394 

Schley,  W.  S.,  245,  255 

Schurman  commission  in  the  Philippines,  289 

Schurz,  Carl,  2, 3, 46, 84, 136, 182 

Schwab,  Charles  M.,  540 

Science,  demand  for  recognition  in  educa 
tion,  7;  and  religion,  warfare  of,  12;  and 
scholarship,  as  the  "new  education,"  n 

Scientific  progress,  390 

Scott,  Frank  A.,  513 

Scott,  Hugh  L.,  345,  475,  489,  540 

Scott,  Thomas  A.,  23,  73 

Scribner's  Magazine,  27 

Scribner's  Monthly,  27,  314 

Seamen's  Act,  418 

Second  Division,  494,  547,  548 

Sedan, 552 

Selective  Service  Act,  498,  536 

Senators,  U.  S.,  direct  election  of,  578 

Separate  peace,  437 

Services  of  Supply,  492 

Settlements,  social,  133 

Sewell,  Arthur,  221 

Sewing  machines,  development  of,  69 

Shafter,  William  R.,  17,  244,  249,  255 

Shame  of  the  Cities,  315 

Shantung,  568 

Shaw,  Anna  Howard,  579 

Sheridan,  Gen.,  prophecy  of  continental  ex 
pansion,  60 

Sherman,  James  Schoolcraft,  359,  381,  389, 
398,  402 

Sherman,  John,  Secretary  of  the  Treasury 
under  Hayes,  2 ;  author  of  bill  for  resump 
tion  of  specie  payments,  41 ;  a  leader  of  the 
Half-Breed  Group  of  Republicans,  46; 
ambitions  for  Presidential  nomination,  88, 
139,  216;  Secretary  of  State  under  McKin- 
ley,  226,  233;  retirement,  256.  See  also 
Silver  Purchase  Act 

Sherman,  Lawrence  Y.,  570 

Sherman,  William  T.,  14 

Sherman  Anti-Trust  Act,  297,  358,  364,  377, 
413 

Shimonoseki,  Treaty  of,  346 

"Shin-plasters,"  36 

Shipping  Control  Committee,  540 

Sholes,  Charles  Latham,  68 

Significance  of  the  Frontier  in  American  His- 
tory,  34 

Silver,  decline  in,  36;  demonetization  of,  175; 
free  coinage  of,  150,  218.  See  also  Bimet 
allism  and  Free  Silver 

Silver  money,  cheap,  103 

Silver  Purchase  Act,  Sherman's,  149,  155, 
170,  184,  189,  191,  205, 206 

Sims,  William  S.,  490,  556,  584 

Sinclair,  Upton,  315 

Sinn  Fein  Republic,  586 

Sioux  Indians,  17 

Sitting  Bull,  17 

"Sixteen  to  One,"  218 

Sky-scrapers,  198 

Slater,  John  F.,  10 

Slums,  problem  of  the,  132 

Smith  College,  9 

Smith,  Goldwin,  50,  149 


INDEX 


601 


Smith,  Hoke,  429 

Smith-Lever  Act,  417 

Social  spirit  and  religion,  319 

Social  unrest  in  1877,  18 

Social  welfare,  higher  level  of,  187 

Socialism  in  Europe,  24,  524,  576 

Socialist  Party,  267,  458;  emergercy  con 
vention  in  Chicago,  479;  split  in  party, 
479. 576 

Sociology,  the  new  science  of,  134 

Soissons,  548 

"  Solemn  referendum,"  581 

Solidarity,  419 

Somme,  third  battle  of,  549 

Sons  of  Vulcan,  199 

South,  development  of  the,  71    . 

Southern  Dakota  Railroad,  159 

Southern  Education  Board,  320 

Southern  Pacific  Railroad,  16,  58,  152; 
merger,  293,  378 

Spain  and  the  Cuban  insurrection,  235;  war 
with,  239 

Spanish  Treaty  of  1898,  569 

Spargo,  John,  480 

Spectator,  London,  523 

Spencer,  Herbert,  32 

Spoils  system,  82 

Spooner,  Senator,  328 

Sport,  rise  of,  1 19 

"Stalwarts,"  collapse  of,  46 

"Stand-pat "  tariff  policy,  394 

"Stand-pat"  Republicans,  354,  365,  369, 
371,  404,  408,  439 

Standard  Oil  Company,  66,  74,  296,  362 

Standard  time,  61 

Stanford,  Leland,  294 

"Star  routes,"  for  mail,  62 

State  constabularies,  460 

State  Councils  of  Defense,  509 

State  Food  Administrations,  505 

"Steam  Roller,"  398 

Stedman,  E.  C.,  29 

Steel,  197,  296 

Steel  strike  of  1919,  574 

Steffens,  Lincoln,  315 

Stettinius,  Edward  R.,  541 

Stevenson,  Adlai  E.,  180 

Stewart,  A.  T.,  72 

Stewart,  William  M.,  36,  174 

Stimson,  Henry  L.,  381 

Stockholm  conference,  the,  524 

Stone,  W.  J.,  447 

Storage  and  Traffic  Service,  541 

"Strict  accountability,"  441 

Strikes,  in  the  Southwest,  130;  of  1892,  Pitts 
burgh,  197;  of  1893,  202.  See  also  Capi 
tal  and  Labor 

Stuenenberg,  Ex-Governor,  461 

Submarine  boat,  440 

Submarine  warfare,  441 ;  unrestricted,  469 

Sugar  Equalization  Board,  505 

Sugar  Trust,  366 

Sumner,  William  Graham,  79 

Sun,  New  York,  50,  73,  91,  94,  334 

Supreme  War  Council,  529,  552,  553,  559 

Surveyor-General  of  Purchases,  541 

Sussex,  the,  449,  467,  469 

Swarthmore  College,  8 

Syndicalism,  459 


Taft,  William  Howard,  chairman  of  Philip 
pine  Commission,  289;  prominent  in  anti 
trust  cases,  298;  criticizes  constitution  of 
Oklahoma,  333;  Secretary  of  War  under 
Roosevelt,  345;  visits  to  Panama,  352; 
supported  by  Roosevelt  for  Presidential 
nomination,  357;  elected  President,  362; 
inaugural  address,  364;  insurgents,  369, 
373;  Cabinet,  373;  tariff  revision,  365; 
Ballinger  controversy,  370;  conservation, 
371;  insurgent  revolt,  373;  constructive 
legislation,  377;  railroad  act  of  1910,  380; 
Panama  Canal,  383;  relations  with  Latin 
America,  384;  Canadian  fisheries  dispute, 
385;  British  arbitration,  386;  reorganized 
Supreme  Court,  388;  Champ  Clark  and 
the  Democratic  program,  388;  Canadian 
reciprocity,  389;  party  split,  393;  tariff 
policy,  394;  National  Republican  Com 
mittee  contests,  397;  renominated  for 
President,  398;  defeated  by  Wilson,  402; 
attuude  toward  Mexican  revolution,  424; 
President  of  League  to  Enforce  Peace,  446: 
joint-chairman  National  War  Labor 
Board,  536,  556;  supports  League  of 
Nations,  565,  587 

Tammany  Democrats,  93 

Tank-cars,  invented,  67 

Tanner,  Corporal,  98,  145, 150 

Tarbell,  Ida  M.,  314 

Tariff,  of  1861  (Morrill),  77;  of  1883,  81;  of 
1890  (McKinley),  147,  151;  of  1894  (Wil 
son),  208;  of  1897  (Dinglcy),  228;  of  1909 
(Payne-Aldrich),  367;  of  1913  (Underwood- 
Simmons),  406,  437;  the,  and  politics,  86; 
and  the  "Iowa  idea,"  305;  bills  of  Under 
wood-La  Follette  combination,  394;  Cleve 
land's  reform  ideas  on,  137,  404;  commis 
sion,  expert,  407;  commission  of  1882,  80, 
commission  of  1916,  451;  the  issue  in  1888, 
135;  revision  of,  77,  306, 365, 377,405-  See 
also  Protection  and  Reciprocity 

Taussig,  F.  W.,  407 

Taxation,  War,  507 

Taxes  before  1865,  78 

Taylor,  Hannis,  236 

Telegraph,  invented,  68 

Telephone,  invented,  68 

Teller,  Henry  M.,  219 

Tennis,  124 

Tenure  of  Office  Bill,  the,  83 

Texas  border,  measures  to  protect,  16 

"Texas  idea,"  the,  305 

Texas  Pacific  Railroad,  57,  58,  73,  102,  294 

The  Man  Roosevelt,  308 

Theodore  Roosevelt  the  Citizen,  308 

Theop.v  of  the  land  laws,  100 

Third'Division,  A.  E.  F.,  547,  548 

Third  Field  Army,  A.  E.  F.,  557 

Third  parties  in  1908,  360 

Third-Party  movements,  586  * 

Thirty-second  Division,  A.  E.  F.,  494,  ^9 

Thirty-third  Division,  A.  E.  F.,  549 

Thompson,  Richard  M.,  Secretary  of  the 
Navy,  2 

Thorpe,  F.  N.,  160 

Thurman,  Allen  G.,  138 

Times,  London,  492 

Times,  Los  Angeles,  461 

Times,  New  York,  471 


6O2 


INDEX 


Times-Democrat,  New  Orleans,  173 

Titanic,  the,  391 

Tom  Sawyer,  26, 339 

Toynbee,  Arnold,  133 

Trade  unions,  organization  of  national,  19 

Tramp  Abroad,  A,  29 

Trans-Missouri   freight  cases,  299 

Transport  fleet,  494 

Transport  service,  543 

Transportation  system,  a  national,  57 

Treasury,  state  of,  in  1893,  184;  in  1894,  207 

Treaty  of  peace  with  Spain,  260,  283 

Treaty  of  Versailles,  opposition  to,  570; 
ratified  by  European  Powers,  571;  rati 
fication  refused  by  U.  S.  Senate,  572 

Treaty  of  Washington,  14 

Treves,  Sir  Frederick,  352 

Tribune,  Chicago,  37,  47,  50,  140,  173,  395 

Tribune,  New  York,  3, 42, 43,  51,  80,  89, 145, 
313,  364,  576 

Trolley-car,  experiments  upon,  70 

Trotzky,  Leon,  475,  525 

Trust  legislation,  413 

Trust  movement,  revival  of,  267,  409 

Trust  problem,  economics  of,  327 

Trusts,  control  of,  312;  expansion  of,  302; 
economic  arguments  against,  151 ;  exchange 
of  directors,  410;  interlocking  directorates, 
415 

Truth,  New  York,  51 

Turkey,  551,  555 

Turner,  Frederick  Jackson,  34 

Tuskegee  Institute,  10 

Tuxedo  Park,  74 

Twain,  Mark.  See  Clemens,  Samuel  Langhorne 

Tweed,  exploits  of,  46 

Twenty-Eighth  (Iron)  Division,  A.  E.  F.,548 

Twenty-Seventh  Division,  A.  E.  F.,  549 

Twenty-Sixth  (Yankee)  Division,  A.  E.  F., 
494, 543, 544, 54» 

Twenty  Years  of  Congress,  54,  88 

"Twilight  of  the  Poets."  29 

Typesetting  machine,  69 

Typewriter,  invented,  68 

Uncle  Remus,  31 

Underwood,  Oscar  W.,  389,  398,  405 
Underwood-Simmons  Act,  406,  411 
Unemployment,    a    cause    of    the    railroad 

strikes  of  1877,  22 
Union  Labor  Party,  167 
Union   Pacific   Railway,   57,   73,    107,  156, 

293 

Union  Party,  the,  83 
Unionism,  secrecy  of,  20 
United  Empire  Loyalists,  14 
United  Labor  Party,  130 
United  Mine  Workers  of  America,  280,  303, 

United  States  grievances  while  a  neutral,  439 
United  States  Bureau  of  Education,  464 
UnitSl  States  Geological  Survey,  337 
United  States  Housing  Corporation,  535 
United  States  Railroad  Administration,  518, 

538,  574, 58o 
United  States  Shipping  Board,  438,  451,  481, 

584 
Unitorl  States  Steel  Corooration.  282.  296, 

•-  war  loans,  527 


University  of  California,  8;  of  Chicago,  8;  of 
Illinois,  8;  of  Minnesota/ 8;  of  the  South, 
8;  of  VVisconsin,  8,  321 

Unrest,  industrial,  194,  566,  573.  Sec  also 
Strikes 

Utah,  163 

Vail,  Theodore  N.,  68 
Van  Devanter,  Justice,  388 
Van  Dyke,  Henry,  423 
Van  Hise,  Charles  Richard,  321 
Vanderbilt,  Cornelius,  72 
Vanderbilt,  William  H.,  23,  68 
Vanderbilt,  Wil'ram  K.,  72 
Vassar  College,  6,  9 
Vaudeville,  317 

Venezuela  dispute,  210,  286,  348,  384 
Vera  Cruz,  427 
Verdun,  467,  551 
Victory  Loan,  508,  564 
Viereck's,  473 

Vilas,  William  F.,  Postmaster-General,  96 
Villa,  Francesco,  427,  450 
Villard,  Henry,  59,  188,  295 
Vincent,  George  E.,  321 
Virgin  Soil,  18 
Viviani,  Rene,  490 
Volstead  Act,  579 

Von  Bernstorff,  Count  Johann,  449,  470,  478 
Von  Herding,  Chancellor,  525 
Von  Igel,  Wolf,  448 
Von  Papen,  448 

Vote,  the  negroes  right  to,  71.  See  also 
Disfranchisement 

Wabash  system,  the,  73,  130 

Wages,  reduction  of  railroad,  in  1877,  18; 

and  prices  in  1890,  126 
Waite,  David  H.,  192 
Wald,  Lillian  D.,  133,  416 
Waldorf  Hotel,  183 
Walking,  120 
Walsh,  Frank  P.,  536 
Wanamaker,  John,  145,  215 
"War  Cabinet,"  520 
War  coalition  governments.  555 
War  College,  345 
War  Department,  reorganization  of,  290, 344, 

540 

War  finance,  485 
War  Finance  Corporation,  539 
War  Industries  Board,  513,  520,  526,  537, 

538,  539,  551.  . 

War  Labor  Policies  Board,  536 
WTar  message,  McKinley's,  238;  Wilson's,  476 
War  revenue  legislation,  437 
War  risk,  499 

War  service  committees,  515 
War  Trade  Board,  503,  506,  563 
Ward,  Artemus,  32 
Warfare,  new  conditions  of,  501 
Warren,  Francis  E.,  489 
Washington,  Booker  T.,  10,  279 
Watchful  Waiting,  423, 425 
Water  powers,  control  of,  338 
Watson,  Thomas  E.,  175,  221,  360 
Wattcrson,  Henry,  377,  419,  427 
Wayland,  Francis,  7 
\Yealth  against  Commonwealth,  201,  298 
Weaver,  James  B.,  50,  172.  174 


INDEX 


603 


Wei-Hai-Wei,  283 

Weller,  Lemuel  H.,  167, 360 

Wellesley  College,  9 

Wells,  David  A.,  79 

Wells,  H.  G.,  267 

West  Point,  7,  291 

West,  women's  education  in,  9 

Western  Federation  of  Miners,  360,  460 

Western  sentiment  upon  conservation,  371 

Western  Union  Telegraph  Company,  the,  68 

Westinghouse  Electric  Company,  338 

Weyler,  Gen.  Valeriano,  234 

Wharton,  Joseph,  79 

Wheat  industry,  106 

Wlien  the  Sleeper  Wakes,  267 

White,  Edward  Douglass,  388 

White,  Henry,  558 

White,  Horace,  92 

Whitlock,  Brand,  305,  423, 435 

Whitney,  William  C.,  96,  180 

Whittier,  John  Greenleaf,  28 

"Wild  West"  shows,  117 

Wilde,  Oscar,  33 

Willard,  Daniel,  537 

William  II  of  Germany,  abdication  of,  553 

Wilson,  Henry  Lane,  425 

Wilson,  William  B.,  404,  415 

Wikon  Tariff  of  1894,  208,  228,  368,  408 

Wilson,  Woodrow,  Congressional  Govern 
ment,  34;  President  of  Princeton  Univer 
sity,  321;  Governor  of  New  Jersey,  382; 
prominent  at  Democratic  Convention,  398; 
nominated  for  President,  400;  elected  as  a 
minority  President,  403;  promises  of  con 
structive  work,  404;  Cabinet,  404;  theory 
of  the  Presidency,  405;  tariff  revision,  405; 
presidential  leadership,  406;  Underwood- 
Simmons  Act,  406;  monetary  investiga 
tions,  408;  anti -trust  policies,  413;  Fed 
eral  Trade  Commission,  414;  Children's 
Bureau,  415;  labor  problems,  415,  456; 
Workmen's  Compensation,  416;  Philippine 
government,  420;  watchful  waiting,  423; 
Mexican  Revolution,  424;  " Mobile  Doc 
trine,"  the,  426;  Canal  treaty  with  Co 
lombia,  426;  Mexican  intervention,  427; 
diplomatic  isolation  of  U.  S.,  428;  repeal  of 
Panama  Canal  tolls  exemption,  429;  Cen 
tral  American  relations,  430;  opening  of 
Panama  Canal,  431;  neutrality  and 
preparedness,  433;  Democratic  successes, 
438;  "Strict  accountability,"  441;  hy 
phenated  Americans,  453;  Adamson  Bill, 
the,  454;  reflected  President,  454;  Law 
rence  strike,  the,  459;  terms  of  peace  with 
Germany,  469;  armed  merchant  ships,  472; 


anti-war  filibuster,  472;  war  message,  476; 
war  preparation,  478;  American  partici 
pation  in  the  war,  489;  Espionage  Act, 
497;  war  policies,  501 ;  Liberty  Loans,  507; 
conservation,  512;  railroad  administration, 
518;  Senator  Chamberlain's  attack,  519; 
"Fourteen  Points,"  the,  522;  "Force  with 
out  limit,"  526;  Colonel  House's  inquiry, 
528;  labor  in  the  war,  534;  "Work  or 
fight,"  536;  requirements,  prices,  and 
priorities,  537;  War  Department  reorgan 
ization,  540;  Congressional  election  of  1918, 
555;  "Unconditional  surrender,"  558; 
American  Commission  to  Negotiate  Peace, 
558;  "Big  Four,"  the,  560;  covenant  of 
the  League  of  Nations,  561;  demobiliza 
tion  in  America,  562;  return  to  Washing 
ton,  566;  Compromises  of  the  Peace  Con 
ference,  568;  treaty  session  of  Congress, 
571;  the  President's  collapse,  572;  "solemn 
referendum,"  the,  581;  Army  Act  of  1920, 
584;  Jones  Merchant  Marine  Act,  584 

\Vindom,  W.  L.,  52,  145 

Windom  Report,  113 

Winning  of  the  West,  117,  243,  275 

Wireless,  391 

"Wisconsin  idea,"  the,  309 

Wister,  Owen,  160 

Woman  in  Industry  Service,  535 

Woman  suffrage,  164,  400,  464,  579 

Women's  education,  9 

WTomen's  Peace  Party,  445,  470 

Women's  rights,  and  the  National  Labor 
Union,  19 

WTood,  Fernando,  79 

Wood,  Leonard,  243,  250,  288,  345,  450,  489, 
497,  556,  582 

Woodford,  Stewart  L.,  235 

"Work  or  fight,"  536 

Workmen's  compensation,  416 

World,  New  York,  179,  576,  582 

World  War,  the,  433 

World's  Fair,  Chicago,  183, 196 

World's  Work,  423 

Wotherspoon,  William  W.,  345 

WTright,  Carroll  D.,  128 

Wright,  Orville,  390 

Wright,  Wilbur,  390 

Yachting,  120 

Yellow  fever,  control  of,  288 

Y.  M.  C.  A.,  319 

Young,  Gen.  S.  B.  M.,  291,  345 

Y.W.C.A.,  319 

Zeppelin,  Count,  391 


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